Okay, we get it, this is about Racial Harmony and Gay Tolerance and Survivors of Childhood Trauma. Worst of all is the preachy tone of the whole novel. It not only doesn't ring true, but totally detracts from the story.

These are teenagers speaking the words of sophisticated script writers. Conroy is obviously trying to reproduce the kind of witty repartee you see on Friends but it just doesn't work here.

Give your readers some credit, you don't have to hit them over the head with every imaginable twist on family dysfunction all in one book.Įmbarrassingly unbelievable dialogue. I can't even cover all the gimmicks Conroy throws into this plot. Where to start? Implausible plot elements.

But now Conroy has taken the 'dysfunctional South Carolina family' formula and beaten it into the ground. The Great Santini and the Prince of Tides are modern classics. South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest a long-awaited work from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds. But the final test of friendship that brings them to San Francisco is something no one is prepared for.

The ties among them endure for years, surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, and Charleston's dark legacy of racism and class divisions. Eventually, he finds his answer when he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes friends Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father hardscrabble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge X and an ever-widening circle whose liaisons will ripple across two decades-from 1960s counterculture through the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. The one and only Pat Conroy returns, with a big, sprawling novel that is at once a love letter to Charleston and to lifelong friendship.Īgainst the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints.

Author of south of broad