And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

The power of this book lies in it's encompassing. Eugenides reaches out and pulls the threads of history, geneaology, culture and present to write something that looks at the legacies we pass on to one another - both physical and psychological. We get this all from the perspective of a narrator with just the right amount of reflective poetic waxing, humor, and straightforward honesty to make it impossible to avoid falling in love with them.

The waters this book muddies - those of love, of gender, and of future and past - are vital for us to examine. It's one thing to have a book focus on an intersex individual - it's another thing to hold the weight of such a story graciously while also bringing our attention to how that story gives us truth that we can take back to ourselves.

This is easily one of my favorite pieces of contemporary fiction, and its so topical. It's one of the truest "American" books I've ever read, stretching across boundaries of ethnicity, immigration, culture and sex to bring us a tale about a person, about our history through those eyes, and about our collective ethos made manifest through the 20th century. I could not recommend this book enough to anyone interested in immigrant stories, gender stories, or just a solid character story set against the rise and fall of that quintessential slice of Americana - Detroit.