"South of Broad”  by Pat Conroy

Review #63

This is Conroy’s first book in 14 years. I’m sure you will remember “Prince of Tides” if nothing else he has written.

The narrator of this book is Charleston, S.C., gossip columnist, Leopold (Leo) Bloom King, a likable but troubled kid who goes from having one best friend, his brother, to having no friends, to suddenly having a gang of friends.

In the late '60s, then 18-year-old Leo befriends a cross-section of the city's inhabitants: members of Charleston aristocracy, Molly Huger, Chad Rutledge and his sister, Fraser; Appalachian orphans, Niles and Starla Whitehead; the black football coach's son, Ike; and a beautiful pair of twins, Sheba and Trevor Poe, who are evading their psychotic father. The story alternates between 1969, the glorious year Leo's friends stormed Charleston's social, sexual and racial barriers, and 1989, when Sheba, now a movie star, enlists them to find her missing gay brother in AIDS-ravaged San Francisco.

This is a complicated story about these friends, their families, their interactions with and support of one another in a changing world.

Note: Leo’s mother is an ex-nun and is also his high school's principal. His loving father is a science teacher at the same school. Leo spends some time in a mental institution after his older brother, Steve, commits suicide at the age of 10, and takes a drug bust rap for a friend of that same brother. In the beginning, he’s on probation and must serve 100 community service hours with an old antique store owner in need of personal attention. It turns out to be one of the best things that ever happened to him.

I enjoyed this book and think you will too.