My Favorite Pat Conroy and I've read them all. Once again I feel like I was there, that I know these people and their crazy lives and once again my own family seems fairly normal!

Couldnt finish it - too many lurid details that drone on and on and on.....Bleck!

I didn't want to put this one down from the moment I started it. Excellent author; great sarcastic wit. Great story line. This is currently my new favorite book!

I read this book many years ago,but it always stood out in my mind as one of my favorite books ever.

I love Pat Conroy's books and have read everyone. I was so excited when this one came out! But then so disappointed when I started it. It slow, difficult to read and dull. Not at all like his previous books. I couldn't finish, even after multiple attempts!

Dull and turgid. However, if you are a Conroy you may enjoy it. Although I found the book unsatisfying it is very well written. It read only two thirds of the this novel.

From Publishers Weekly: "A man tries to make peace with himself in the wake of his wife's suicide in Conroy's long-awaited blockbuster, which was a PW bestseller for 24 weeks." Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal: "Conroy's was the most talked-about book at the American Booksellers Association convention, even though it was reputedly only half-written. Hero Jack McCall, who has fled to Rome after his wife's suicide, is asked to locate a Sixties buddy whose antiwar activity drove him underground." Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --

The hero, Jack McCall, describes himself as a man on the run from his past: the suicide of his beloved wife; the destructive influence of his icy, manipulative mother and mean, bullying, alcoholic father; the betrayal of his youthful ideals, his faith in the Catholic Church, his boyhood friends. Conroy takes on these emotionally laden issues in chapters so direct and powerful that readers will be moved by his intimacy with the material, and perhaps astonished by his authority over it. Conroy meshes complex plot lines with ease. Jack, a food and travel writer, fled with his toddler daughter, Leah, to Rome in 1982 in the wake of his wife Shyla's suicidal jump from a bridge in Charleston, S.C., and her parents' subsequent lawsuit to deny him custody of Leah. He returns home some years later because his mother is dying of leukemia. In addition to becoming embroiled in family tension, he begins a slow process of reconciliation with Shyla's parents, who eventually tell him the stories of their respective Holocaust experiences; with his first love, Ledare Ashley, now a scriptwriter employed by their youthful chum, Mike Hess, to write a screenplay of their growing-up years; and with his parents and siblings. He witnesses the return to Waterford of another friend, Jordan Elliot, who has been presumed dead for 18 years after he was accused of murder during a protest against the Vietnam War, and who was betrayed by the fourth member of their boyhood clan, Capers Middleton, who is now running for governor of South Carolina.

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