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Loading... South of Broad
Work detailsSouth of Broad by Pat Conroy
None.  AdonisGuilfoyle | Jun 1, 2013 |  Mindless read but enjoyable. Many subplots. Some good causes are explained, championed (early AIDS, integration, social class) but this is not a deep or textured read. The characters are enjoyable but they're caricatures rather than fully develped characters. Still, a page turner. (  ) arlongworth | May 22, 2013 | This book gets four stars just from how much I love reading Pat Conroy. Underneath the gorgeous writing, however, was a group of relationships I had a hard time believing in and a few villians that were just too over the top. But the way he writes, all is forgiven. (  ) Capnrandm | Apr 15, 2013 | I love the storyteller that comes through in Pat Conroy's books and they are great (although long) on audio. His use of non ordinary words makes me fall in love with the English language once again. (  ) lindap69 | Apr 5, 2013 | An interesting book about growing up in Charleston SC. I will admit I finished it at lunch and I did cry. ( ) purlewe | Mar 31, 2013 |
 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.  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. 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. 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.
No descriptions found. 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) (summary from another edition) |
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6
First of all, I couldn't quite stomach how perfect Leo was - his introductions to all these troubled teens, and the speed with which he mops up the frequent adolescent messes they get themselves into, were nauseating to say the least. 'Hey, uncuff these delinquent hillbillies, I'm going to turn their messed up lives around' - 'Oh thank you, Leo!' or 'Hey, I baked you some cookies and I won't tell a soul that your mother is a raving alcoholic' - 'You're amazing, Leo, let me pop your cherry by way of thanks' I just ... But then I think Pat Conroy got bored, and decided that instead of some coming of age/nostalgic righting of social wrongs, he really wanted to pen a hackneyed thriller, so started throwing in action scenes and mutilated corpses. And don't even remind me of the 'shocking revelation' of the final chapters, which was signposted in neon very early on but then ignored for the rest of the book - just stop already! You have reached your cliche quota, Mr Conroy; start a new book if you wish to write more.
Three stars for being able to get through this certifiable drivel in the shortest possible time, but if, like me, you want to read about South Carolina, buy a travel guide. (