Leo King is about to enter his senior year at Peninsula High School in Charleston, SC. Dr. King, his principal, Joyce scholar and mother, gives him an assignment one summer day—Bloomsday—to meet the new African American football coach and his son, tell three runaways at the orphanage about the high school they’ll attend, welcome the new family across the street, including twins, with cookies he’ll bake and meet his parents for lunch at the yacht club to meet two more kids, part of Charleston’s elite, who’ll join him for his senior year. South of Broad, a reference to those from the privileged end of Charleston, follows these kids and their triumphs and tragedies for the next 20 years. It’s also the story of Leo’s very Catholic family and the impact his brother Stephen’s death has on all of them. A beautiful ode to Charleston from the end of the 1960s through the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo. You are immersed in a place of great beauty and southern sensibility—to Conroy and Leo a place like no other. The story verges on melodrama but Conroy keeps it together and his writing just stays true to what story we’re being told, a little like ’Gone with the Wind!’ Good storytelling, good characters.

posted May 6, 2010 at 1:53PM

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