Review The Prince Of Tides Developed By Pat Conroy Accessible As EPub

don't understand why this book gets rave reviews, I made it through the nearlypages, but I can't say that I enjoyed most of it, Here is a random excerpt: "I tasted the wine and it was so robust and appealing that I could feel my mouth singing with pleasure when I brought the glass from my lips.
The aftertaste held like a chord on my tongue my mouth felt like a field of flowers, The mousse made me happy to be alive, " Give me a break. Am I supposed to believe all of this I felt like the novel was really over the top and long.
And the ending bah. This is the second time Ive listened to the audiobook of this wonderful novel, The narrator does a phenomenal job, The first time I listened to it was several years ago when I was commuting to work, and there is one scene that had me bawling my guts out, which is super embarrassing when youre in heavy traffic on the highway.


In the story, poet Savanah has attempted suicide again, While she is in a mental hospital recovering, her brother Tom comes up to New York from South Carolina to check on her.
Her psychiatrist, Dr. Lowenstein, wants to talk to him to find out about Savanahs past to see if that can help her help Savanah.
So Tom recounts their difficult childhood as the children of an abusive shrimper father and a beauty queen mother who was discontent with motherhood and their poverty.
There are several scenes that recount the differences between the poor and the privileged,

Through this narrative device of Tom meeting several times with Dr, Lowenstein, Tom tells sprawling stories of their youth, Sometimes its almost like youre reading interconnected short stories, but the writing is masterful, so you dont mind going on what can seem like tangents.
Plus, there is humor, and the siblings there is also another brother, who is dead by the time we start the novel, but we learn about him as Tom recounts their upbringing are likeable, complex characters.
All the characters are well drawn, The South and history are also characters in the book,

Tom himself is in a crumbling marriage, and he screwed up his career as a high school football coach.


I love this novel and highly recommend it, Its my favorite Pat Conroy book,

For more of my reviews, please visit: sitelink theresaalan. net/blog This is a story about Tom Wingo and his belated attempts to come to grips with his abusive childhood.
His sister has made yet another suicide attempt, and Tom comes to New York to see her and speak to her psychiatrist.
They both have never mentally healed from their abusive childhood, Half of this story is flashbacks of their upbringing, which was full of mental and physical abuse,

I loved the firstor so pages, After that, it felt like trying to swim in molasses, This one is nearpages, buttopages of decriptives could have been cut out with no difference made in the plot.
Whole pages could be skipped at a time with no effect, and by the end I skipped a lot of pages.
My stubbornness will often not let me DNF a book, This is my first Conroy novel, but I do not feel impressed enough to give him a second try, The descriptiveness is overdone, and I hear he writes of the same subjects repetitively, which is just not for me.


Contains offensive racial slurs, profanity and a descriptive rape scene, Contains many incestuous undertones. A positive note though, this abusive family may make you feel a lot better that maybe your upbringing was not so bad after all.
I'm waiting for the day that Pat Conroy will disappoint me, I'm waiting for the day that he fails to astound me, to take my breath away with each poetically seductive word that he has chosen, to stir emotions deep within me that I only feel and understand when I am reading his literature.


I am pertinaciously confident that that day will never come, Pat Conroy's prose is tragically acquainted with all the misery and glory and pain and beauty of humanity, It is also deeply entrenched in the American south, I believe he immortalizes his own time and place the way Hemingway did for wartime Europe, This story, so startlingly brutal and direct in it's engagement of the reader, lays out the impressive and failed life of Tom Wingo.
The plain good virtue and astonishing cruelty of smalltown South Carolina take shape in an uneasy and inevitable connection, vying ferociously with the complicated sadness of modernity.
This book is treacherous and difficult, wounding at the very threshold of a happy or cathartic moment, and while it is not always pleasant to read, it is provocative and cathartic.
It is an angry and sensitive book, dedicated to an ideal of America and made up of terrific stories, It is all tied together in the structure of a novel, and ends up being well worth the read, My wound is geography,  It is also my anchorage, my port of call,

So begins the story of the Wingo family of Melrose Island in Colleton County, South Carolina, As told by Tom Wingo,  

To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open you an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, “There.
 That taste.  Thats the taste of my childhood, ”  I would say, “Breathe deeply,” and you would breathe and remember that smell for the rest of your life, the bold, fecund aroma of tidal marsh, exquisite and sensual, the smell of the South in heat, a smell like new milk, semen, and spilled wine, all perfumed with seawater.
 My soul grazes like a lamb on the beauty of indrawn tides,  

Tom has a twin sister Savannah and as the story opens Savannah, a successful poet, who lives in New York City has just attempted to end her life by slashing her wrists with a razor blade.
 This is not the first time,  He also has an older brother Luke who he idolizes, but Luke is not there as this story opens and to understand why, why his sister is barely clinging with frightening, frailty to life, why his big brother is not present well, then we have to go back.
 Back to when they were children, Back to when Lila and Henry, their parents, controlled the great tides of their life.
 

It is not a pretty picture, The Wingos of Melrose island were an intensely disturbing, dysfunctional family,  Their three children survived a brutal upbringing, one that they were not allowed ever to discuss or even acknowledge isolated from the neighbouring community of Colleton, with only each other to turn to for strength, support and comfort.
 Their bond seemed unbreakable.

Still there is beauty here:

It was growing dark on this long southern evening and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, lightintoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils.
 Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold.
. . The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, the depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks.
 The moon then rose quickly, rose like a bird from the water, from the trees, from the islands, and climbed straight up gold, then yellow, then pale yellow, pale silver, silver bright, then something miraculous, immaculate, and beyond silver, a color native only to southern nights.


These days Tom Wingo is a family man himself with a beautiful wife and three beautiful daughters but he can feel it all slipping away.
 He used to be a teacher and a coach, work that he loved, but that was before Luke,  Now he cannot seem to bring himself to give his wife the intimacy she craves, he wants to, but it is like he is frozen, unable to get himself in motion.
 He knows even before his wife confirms it, that he is losing her,  Perhaps their time apart, while he is in New York City trying to help his sister will give them both an opportunity to reflect and come to terms with what they really want.
  It is in New York that Tom meets Susan Lowenstein, Savannahs psychiatrist and at her urging turns back the hands of time as he relates the events of their childhood in a last ditch effort to help Lowenstein understand the trauma that may go a long way in explaining Savannahs suicide attempts and her current mental state.


It is the beginning of a long and uncanny season in the house of Wingo,  There will be honor and decency and the testing of the qualities of our humanity, or the lack of them.
 There will be a single hour of horror that will change our lives forever,  There will be carnage and murder and ruin,  When it is over, we will all think that we have survived the worst day of our lives, endured the most grisly scenario the world could have prepared for us.
 We will be wrong.

Violence sends deep roots into the heart it has no seasons it is always ripe, evergreen.


There will also be Luke, our Prince of Tides, Lukes story however is one you would be well advised to read for yourselves,

But there is also a Bengal tiger and whales and a rare white porpoise and the South Carolina low country.
 There is sadness and brutality yes, but also adventure and mirth and heart swelling love all wrapped up in Conroys luscious, lyrical, haunting prose.


Later when we spoke of our childhood, it seemed part elegy, part nightmare,

I am sure a great many of you have likely already seen the movie with Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte, which was great.
 I loved it!   You may be thinking why should I read the book when I already know the story   Why Because there is so much more story here and because it is so beautifully written that it brings tears to my eyes and my chest feels oddly swollen, just remembering some of Conroys passages.
 The movie cannot even begin to compare or compete,  

All The Stars in The Sky! I read a lot of different genres, My only goal is to be entertained, I'll read horror in the hope that there is an author out there who can still shock me, I'll read fantasy or science fiction in the hope that some author will blow my mind with an incredible world or amazing life forms.
I'll read suspense thrillers in the hope that there is still an author that will break the mould and twist a plot line so unexpectedly that it will keep me awake at night.

Those are the things I look for, and the things that will make me rate a book five.

But underlining all of

this, is the most important thing of all, Keep me engaged with a great story with great characters,
Well, obviously you can see the five star rating here, so you know what the deal is,

The Prince of Tides is one of the best novels I've read in a long time, It's not horror or otherworldly or has an urgent hunt on for a homicidal lunatic, This is simply a family drama, about a South Carolina man whose twin sister has attempted suicide, The story follows Tom as he travels to New York City to discuss his sister's state with her psychologist and he relates their
childhood to her in the hopes that she can better understand her patient.


My kindle edition had this listed aspages, but I would imagine the print edition had the words densely packed as this seemed longer than that.
Not to say this was a slog, because the story was very difficult to put down, This is
simply a big book!

Pat Conroy is a master storyteller, His dysfunctional southern hick family has all the quirkiness you would want, and all the sensitivities you would expect from close knit siblings.
The quality of writing and sheer engaging quality of the narrative is something you would expect from Stephen King if he was a straight fiction writer.

The best thing I can say about any novel is that I am sorry it is finished, I loved being into it,

An easy five and highly recommended to anyone, This is the book that is the reason I read anything at all for pleasure, I decided I was going to read it before the movie came out and COMPLETELY fell in love with Conroy's style, renewed my loveaffair with the low country of South Carolina, and discovered the joy of diving into a book wholeheartedly.
Mr. Conroy is the reason I read today, The stories of what this family went through are heartbreaking at one or more moments and hysterical at others, I didn't think the movie was halfbad, but the book is phenomenal, "You and I aren't crazy, Tom, We're normal. Especially me. You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read, People who like to read are always a little fued up, "
Luke Wingo

Come on down to South Carolina and meet the Wingo family, They're a rowdy crowd but you can't help but love them,

You got Tom Wingo our fearless, sarcastic, sometimes ass hole hero and narrator, He's a bit of an enigma but you'll love him,

Tom's twin sister Savanna, Artistic, sweet, caring, and oh so psychotic, She just needs a little love and understanding,

The older brother Luke, Typical homegrown southern boy. Loves God, his family, and the south, Maybe a little too much, He was my favorite

The doting mother, Lila Wingo, Will do anything for her children, Including making their childhood a living hell,   Abusive, delusional, conniving bitch.

Henry Wingo. The patriarch. Distinguished shrimp boat captain. Always looking for the next getrichquick scheme, Mean drunk. Hard right hook. A real son of a bitch,

This was an amazing book, An epic following a southern family on their journey to come to grips with what happened in the past and learn to forgive.


Thanks for the recommendation, Don,   Before I wrote this, I took a cursory look at a few of the reviews and realized to my dismay that in this case I am the Grinch who took the roast beast.
And yet I stand by my rating because this book was for me an exercise in maudlin pablum, The protagonist experiences all matter of tragedy in his youth, both quotidian and bizarre an abusive wretch of a father, a venal socially climbing mother, a horrific yet nonsensical assault and then grows up to have a mentally ill sister and a cheating wife.
There's also some mystery about his brother's fate but I won't spoiler it for you hint: it's nonsensical too, The aforementioned sister has suffered a breakdown which takes him from South Carolina to NYC where he meets her therapist.
There, he tells the story of their life to nice therapist lady with lines like, "I haven't gotten to the worst part yet.
I haven't told you about the time they picked up and MOVED my hometown, Doctor, Ahem, sniff sniff. " Yes that scene is in the book, At some point he hooks up with the therapist, She has a snooty violinist husband, That is the highlight reel, Now you don't have to read this book, De nada.

I'm not completely heartless, The story about the pet tiger choked me up a little, Waita pet tiger in South Carolina In the's See I told you this book was freaking ridiculous, By the way, I read this around the same time the movie came out and told a friend who had seen it I hated the book but the part with the tiger was sad.
She said, "Tiger"

I have heard that The Great Santini was a better Conroy book and I did like the movie version of it.
Then again, people seem to like this book too, So for now, I'll go back to stuffing the Who's Xmas tree up the chimney, .