Both Sue and LEP say this book is an excellent story, my prerequisite for any book worth reading and go figure I couldn’t finish it. It might be that mid-semester I couldn’t focus on the story of a hermaphrodite’s history across three generations. The story-telling is terrific including the history of Greek-Turkish strife in Smyrna and the early industrial history of Detroit at the time auto manufacturing was king and prohibition made it difficult for workers to numb their senses to becoming part of Henry Ford’s assembly lines. For me, however, the stories were strung together too loosely and I couldn’t find enough tension or plot to make me want to pick up the book often enough to find out how it ended. March 2006.