South of Broad by Pat Conroy (2009)

I ended up liking this book, though the writing jarred me in the beginning. It is obviously a love letter to Charleston, South Carolina, a term I found others have used too.

To get the jarring things out of the way. Conroy made a statement at the very beginning of the book that made me think things were going to go a lot worse than they did, and I kept being surprised that many things went well: "If I knew then what I have come to learn, I would never have made a batch of cookies for the new family across the street, never uttered a single word to the orphans, and never introduced myself to the two students who were kicked out of Porter-Gaud School and quickly enrolled at my own Peninsula High for their senior year." After finishing the book, I still don't know what the narrator Leo meant by this sentence. The people he met on that one day became his best friends for life. Sure there were problems, and tragedies, but these kids bonded within months of that first day of meeting and went through thick and thin throughout their lives.

I was looking for some examples of the overly creative writing that distracted me unpleasantly from the flow of the story. In the very beginning he writes: "I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the hinged shell of some soft-tissuedmollusk. My soul is peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen." Now that I have read the book, those sentences actually make sense (e.g. Charleston is on a peninsula), but in the beginning I just thought "what the ?" Here's another sentence that just seemed too much: "She could freeze me with a gaze that made the dead of winter seem like the best time for planting."

Otherwise, it was a story of a group of kids that were misfits each in their own way, but grew to be tight friends, a friendship that has lasted for years and lets them live through some difficult times together. Leo the narrator writes for a newspaper. One is a movie star, one a musician, one becomes the first black chief of police, his wife also on the force, one a lawyer. The guys all played football together. Three were rich kids that landed in public school for indiscretions. Three sets of brother and sister. Eight of the friends intermarry and stay in Charleston, one of the brother-sister teams goes off to California, but ends up coming home, at least for a while. Bottom line - pretty good book, not one I am going to gift further.