South of Broad: A Novel (edition 2010)

by Pat Conroy

Members	Reviews	Popularity	Average rating	Mentions
3,052	172	4,454	(3.67)	120
Leopold Bloom King, the narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death. Eventually 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.… (more)

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Member:	lauralistar
Title:	South of Broad: A Novel
Authors:	Pat Conroy
Info:	Dial Press Trade Paperback (2010), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 544 pages
Collections:	Your library
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South of Broad by Pat Conroy (Author)

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English (166) Spanish (4) French (1) Finnish (1) All languages (172)

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Showing 1-5 of 166 (next | show all)

I was first drawn to Conroy's writing; it is as lush as the azalea and camellias that make Charleston such a lovely city. I loved the way the first chapter introduced all the characters and described them so perfectly that they were set in my mind for the entire book. What an improbable group of friends, but Leo was able to pull them all together. I admired his quiet compassion and wisdom; he always seemed to know the right way to handle any situation and move it toward the best outcome. The depth of the friends' caring for each other when they reunited as adults and embarked on the trip to San Francisco to save Trevor was maybe a bit unrealistic, but Conroy made me believe, and I was even inspired. In the end all the loose ends were tied up nicely. It was undoubtedly a melodrama but one that drew me in completely. (

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NMBookClub | Mar 14, 2024 |

For once, I'm recording my impression immediately after finishing a book. The reason is that basically the end of the book left me with a surprising amount of energy and desire for action. I'm sitting here questioning how much I should believe that, but it's hard not get caught up in Conroy's characters' feelings. Leo's triumph and nice, novelistic ending is not one that I necessarily think I can achieve, but it still manages to leave me feeling good. I'd say this is typical of the book as a whole, where an entire cast of characters appears and moves around in a way that - while not predictable exactly - lends itself to feeling like it's on rails, with just a hint too much deus ex. I don't feel that seriously harms the novel though for me; I take it with an understanding of suspension of disbelief and the enjoyment is conscious rather than consuming. (

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Zedseayou | Jan 30, 2024 |

I love Pat Conroy's florid prose. I love the characters he writes and the passion with which he writes. I think this may be my favorite Pat Conroy novel. (

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maryelisa | Jan 16, 2024 |

Here's what I wrote in 2010 about this read: "Easy read, with a flair for the dramatic. Come on, nobody talks constantly about gay sex like Trevor Poe, or has such a consistently smart aleck tongue like "Toad" (the narrator). Still a good story to keep company in the winter . . . And great eulogy to Charleston." (

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MGADMJK | Aug 17, 2023 |

Conroy's prose is as beautiful as ever, but the plot is just too far fetched and the end of the novel gets way too sentimental (

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kevinkevbo | Jul 14, 2023 |

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▾Published reviews

4 reviews

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thingScore 38

Conroy thanks his editor Nan A. Talese in his acknowledgments, but South of Broad merely adds urgency to the question of what it is this woman does, exactly, apart from pick up the tab.

added by Shortride | editOpen Letters Monthly, Sam Sacks (Oct 1, 2009)

Conroy remains a magician of the page. As a writer, he owns the South Carolina coast. But the descriptions of the tides and the palms, the confessions of love and loss, the memories “evergreen and verdant” set side by side with evocations of the “annoyed heart” have simply been done better — by the author himself.

added by Shortride | editThe New York Times Book Review, Roy Hoffman (Aug 23, 2009)

Conroy is an entertaining storyteller -- he has a corker of a final twist here -- yet much of “South of Broad” shows a weakness for emotional fireworks, two-dimensional characters and rough or purplish prose.

added by Shortride | editBloomberg, Jeffrey Burke (Aug 11, 2009)

Conroy reels his teenage characters through cliché showdowns of racial and class divisions, trying to make those broad social issues the backdrop to the personal stories in the narrative -- including the recurring presence of the shadowy and vicious Poe father. But Conroy doesn't have anything new or interesting to say about the racial and class divides. And too many of his characters are set up as types instead of fully fledged people, incapable, at times, of anything more than the most mundane of dialogues.

added by Shortride | editLos Angeles Times, Scott Martelle (Aug 11, 2009)

▾Other authors

» Add other authors (2 possible)

Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
Conroy, Pat	Author	primary author	all editions	confirmed
Deakins, Mark	Reader	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Eiroa Guillén, Ana	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Marlière, Guillaume	Traduction	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Marlière, Marie-Lise	Traduction	secondary author	some editions	confirmed

▾Series and work relationships

▾Awards and Honors

Distinctions

New York Times bestseller (Fiction – 2009)

Notable Lists

ALA Over the Rainbow Book List (Selection – Fiction – 2011)

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▾Common Knowledge

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Canonical title

Information from the French Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.

Charleston Sud

Original title

South of Broad

Alternative titles

Original publication date

2009-08-11

People/Characters

Important places

Charleston, South Carolina, USA

San Francisco, California, USA

Asheville, North Carolina, USA

Chimney Rock, North Carolina, USA

Important events

Hurricane Hugo (1989)

Related movies

Epigraph

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife and fellow novelist, Cassandra King, who helped more than anyone in bringing South of Broad to its publication. To me, she is the finest thing ever produced on an Alabama farm.

First words

It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River.

Quotations

Being a failed teenager is not a crime, but a predicament and a secret crucible. It is a fun-house mirror where distortion and mystification lead to the bitter reflections that sometimes ripen into self-knowledge. Time is the only ally of the humiliated teenager, who eventually discovers that the golden boy of the senior class is the bald, bloated drunk at the twentieth reunion, and that the homecoming queen married a wife beater and philanderer and died in a drug rehabilitation center before she was thirty.

So there I was, a delivery boy making my rounds in a city where beauty ambushed you at every turn of the wheel, rewarded every patient inspection, and entered your pores and bloodstream from every angle; these images could change the way the whole world felt. It was a city that shaped the architecture of my memories and dreaming, adding cornices and parapets and the arched glooms of Palladian windows every time I rode those streets, full of purpose and duty.

Last words

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Disambiguation notice

Publisher's editors

Blurbers

Original language

Information from the French Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language.

Anglais (Etats-Unis)

Canonical DDC/MDS

Canonical LCC

▾References

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (1)

South of Broad

▾Book descriptions

Leopold Bloom King, the narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death. Eventually 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.

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Book description

Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy's first novel in 14 years. In the late '60s and after his brother commits suicide, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city's inhabitants: scions of Charleston aristocracy; Appalachian orphans; a black football coach's son; and an astonishingly beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo's coterie stormed Charleston's social, sexual and racial barricades, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco. Too often the not-so-witty repartee and the narrator's awed voice (he is very fond of superlatives) overwhelm the stories surrounding the group's love affairs and their struggles to protect one another from dangerous pasts. Some characters are tragically lost to the riptides of love and obsession, while others emerge from the frothy waters of sentimentality and nostalgia as exhausted as most readers are likely to be. Fans of Conroy's florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat.

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