Beach Music [Hardcover]

PAT CONROY (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 800 pages
• Publisher: BOOK CLUB (1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0606110968
• ISBN-13: 978-0606110969
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (335 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,876,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Pat Conroy is the author of eight previous books: The Boo, The Water is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music, My Losing Season, and The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life. He lives in Fripp Island, South Carolina. Photo copyright: David G. Spielman

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

146 of 155 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars MUSIC TO MY EARS, October 21, 2001

By 

Nancy Martin (Pennsylvania (orig. NY)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beach Music (Hardcover)

To read a book by Pat Conroy is to come to the realization that so much of everything else I read, and think is good, is truly just an appetizer getting me ready for the main course -- which is what Conroy is. Every sentence you read lures you into the web of Conroy's storytelling. This is a book that will take you from the piazzas in Rome to the low country of South Carolina. You will fall so deeply in love with each setting that you couldn't possibly decide which place you would prefer to live.

Every character is a tortured soul who has a tale to tell -- one more heartbreaking than the other. The main story follows Jack McCall, who flees to Rome with his young daughter Leah after his beloved wife Shyla has committed suicide. He leaves behind a bevy of colorful family and friends in an effort to escape his torment and begin a new life in a new land. As a travel writer by trade, Jack is able to pick up and live wherever he chooses. It is a telegram from a family member that will finally bring Jack back to South Carolina to face his demons and learn the stories of all those he loves.

Conroy has the ability of dropping crumbs along the way leading you to each character's hidden story. He touches on times in history involving the Holocaust and the Vietnam War -- each decade so real that I don't even want to think about the horrors. But it is these horrors that have come to shape the characters whose cards have been dealt and whose hands must be played. They are all part of a finely interwoven story with South Carolina as the stage for the grand finale.

In reading the book, I can only wonder if the author can write the last twenty pages and not cry himself. I don't usually cry when reading a book but I must admit that this one did me in. Conroy so neatly ties up all the loose ends so that the reader feels no need for a sequel as they are confident that the lives of the characters they have come to love will go on.

While this is a book about tortured souls, it is also a book that holds great promise filled with love and hope and devotion and yes...redemption. We always talk about the books that will stay with us forever. This is one for me...music to my ears...Beach Music that is.

55 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most difficult of Conroy's novels, March 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Beach Music (Mass Market Paperback)

Pat Conroy is my favorite author--I just wish he produced a new book every three months like John Grishom. There is absolutely nobody else who has the power of "description" and "Imagery" that he has.

I love Conroy's writing because it is always so contradictory. He makes you love and hate his characters at the same time. I started out by being completely annoyed with John Hardin in this novel, and then he ended up being my favorite character--he was so funny and outrageous. I felt the same about his mother--loved and hated her at the time time. I remember this was also true of his characters when I read "Prince of Tides." He has such an ability to play with the reader's emotions.

Beach Music was harder than his other novels because of so many subplots & characters, but instead of wishing it hadn't been so long and gone into so much, I found myself wishing it was longer, and he had developed the characters & subplots even more.

There is always a feeling of "letdown" when you finish one of Pat Conroy's novels because you don't want it to end. Nobody writes about "dysfunction" with his sense of humor.

53 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars yummy & luscious, April 14, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Beach Music (Mass Market Paperback)

I'm usually a reviewer who argues for strong editing, saying books are too long and in need of brutal slashing and burning.
But this book of Pat Conroy's doesn't fall in that category; I loved and cherished every word of it. It's rich, lush, full of atmospheric detail.
Pat Conroy at his best, and it makes me want to go to Italy and the South.