![]() ![]() Fans of Conroy's florid prose and earnest melodramas are in for a treat. 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. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. 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. 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. ![]() ![]() 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. Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. ![]() 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 publishing event of the season: 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. Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist Leopold Bloom King narrates a paean to his hometown and friends in Conroy's first novel in 14 years. ![]()
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