Pat Conroy

a novel

South of Broad

A Novel

Peggy Walker

This is sort of "Big Chill" comes to Charleston book. Pat Conroy is still the best there is at descriptive prose. I can smell all the flowers, the salt marshes, the ocean, the rich soil. I can feel the humidity and the pressure drop as the hurricane approaches. I can see the houses in a city I have never visited, and get a feel for a culture so different from Los Angeles. One thing that stood out in this book is the depth of the friendships in it...that isn't always as strong in his books. It is, of course, full of dysfunctional people from horrific childhoods. One secret revealed at the end was one I saw coming from hundreds of pages away. I agree with others that the story resolutions were a bit.....flat? disappointing? lazy??? I'm not sure, but I do love the main character dearly and would love to give him a hug. And in spite of minor disappointments, it's still Pat Conroy...still totally unique at what he does.

Alex King

This was my first Pat Conroy book. It was hard to get into it at first because of his descriptive writing style. But as I kept reading I loved it. 

Seeing as I took a trip to Charleston just a few months ago this book was very fun to read! The places he described were so accurate, I could picture them as if I had just left Charleston. This was my favorite part of this book. I feel as if Conroy loves CHarleston as much as Leo King himself. 

He had me laughing out loud more than once. One of my favorite lines (of which I read out loud to my fiance) went something like "One of my favorite people are those who can give accurate directions, and their tribe is small." Of course he wrote it much more wittier than I, but you get the idea. His book was full of witty and clever one liners. For this reason alone I would/prolly will read another Conroy.

Elizabeth Moore

This book was such a disappointment I cannot even handle it. I have been trying to read Pat Conroy forever now, as I have always heard such great things about his work.

The dialogue in this book is abysmal- Conroy forces every single character and plot revelation (that we missed in the undocumented 20 years of these characters growing up between 18 and 38) to come out through stilted, unrealistic dialogue, and it actually made me really dislike characters I really, really wanted to root for.

The plot twists all seemed smashed into the last 150 pages of the book, and I didn't get how any of them were connected and I felt like this was an example of writing something "that really did happen!!" and then using that as an excuse as to why the events should be believable. Not that I think the stuff in here did happen, but it just was so hard to figure out why everything was included- I feel like serious, serious editing was missed on this book.

What made me give it 2 stars is that Pat Conroy's descriptions when he is on-point are just beautiful. I LOVED Part one of this story before the first flash forward, and even though I didn't believe Toad's way of speaking matched his character, the descriptions of Charleston and of family and just of the world through a troubled kid's eyes were really really amazing.

Best parts of the book were the descriptions of Charleston, the Paper Route, and then line where Toad's Mom urges his Dad to "tell the whole story" and his dad tells Toad in reference to Trevor, "they found the same color of nail polish in Trevor's bedroom. Apparently he paints his toenails."

Pat Conroy can write, he just completely got over-ambitious on this book and stuck too blindly to the story he had in his head rather than paying duty to his audience and editing the crap out of this thing and not taking terrible, sloppy shortcuts.

Elizabeth Raines

One of the best books I’ve ever read. Best book so far this year.
Pros
- best written characters that I’ve ever read.
- jaw dropping.
- it’s rare for books to make me emotional but this one did.
- loved the setting and alternating timelines

Cons
-Very long and tedious.

Lots of trigger warnings, the main ones being racism, homophobia, and sexual abuse. There’s more so I advise you to look into it before picking up this book.

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I would love to say that I loved this book, or even that I liked it a lot but no such luck. While South of Broad does have some nice elements and some beautiful prose, the whole story just never gelled for me. I think that so much of it was so over the top that it became almost a farce.

I thought that the trip to San Francisco to rescue Trevor was a needless sub-plot, complete with a vicious killer named Bunny and a cameo from the twins' deranged father. I don't know of too many average joe's who would have volunteered to serve meals to dying AIDS patients in the 1980's since much about how the disease spread was unknown. I also don't know many who would clean bodiily fluids off of a total stranger infected with AIDS either. They spent so much time there, I started to think that the book should have been called West of Broad.

Sheba's ability to circulate amongst the common folk after she became a world-famous movie star was a little hard to buy, as was the speed with which characters like Wormy and Chad do an abrupt about-face and embrace people as friends whom they would normally spit on. I found some of the abuse that the characters endured to be a bit much - this should have been a group of maladjusted nuts. And I really didn't get the need for the whole sub-plot with the homocidal father. Finally, I thought that Steve's suicide would have played a much larger part in the story since it seemed to form the foundation for much of what happened in Leo's life. What would have prompted a 10 year-old golden boy who had it all to slit his wrists? The suicide took a backseat to the rest of the melodrama and rode there until the very end when a predictable, however unrealistically brought about, piece of information surfaces to explain things. All wrapped up with a tidy bow. 

I actually thought this book was somewhat like the last one of his I read - The Lords of Discipline. That book was also filled with sub-plots that didn't add anything to the story and had a meandering feel. 

Much like a hospital gown, this book never quite came together for me.

One of Conroy's most intricate, I believe, in that the internal struggles are more prevalent, and more deliberate. As always, Conroy makes Charleston seem like a fairy tale, and one can't help but dream of it after reading this novel, too. The characters are alive as always, and very flawed, while maintaining a semblance of integrity that most would be envious of. 

Overall, again like all Conroy, highly recommended.

South of Broad a novel

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