The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

This is a story of love, loss, acceptance, suicide, domestic abuse, rape, insanity and fishing for shrimp. But not in that order. The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy is a story about a man named Tom Wingo, whose sister, Savannah, suffers from severe insanity were she hallucinates barking dogs from meat hooks and stone statues who tell her to kill herself. After hearing that Savannah has tried to commit suicide, Tom travels from South Carolina, his home state, to New York City, where Savannah lives. There he meets Savannah's therapist, Susan Lowenstien, with whom he tells all of his childhood stories that could be the causes of Savannah's extreme state of depression. Tom tells Lowenstien about all of the horrible and cruel things that have happened in his past, to the strange and complicated relationships he has with his twin sister Savannah, his mother, his father and his older brother, to his current troubles involving his wife and Lowenstien's problems. Savannah, who is a poet, conveys her thoughts when she speaks in poetic form. This, like most of the book, is Pat Conroy's style of writing. He writes this book from a poets viewpoint and uses figurative language and imagry to convay a sort of dreamlike state when you read about the different stories that Tom tells. As the book progresses and as you read more of Savannah's poems, you begin to realize that the poems are based on previous experiences that she subconsciously writes about. "Coats are the plenary music I make with my dreaming hands, but only the hunter knows the true hazard of fur. He takes the tiger's many-pillared coat and buries his face in the starshine and strength of a thousand Bengali nights. This pelt is a perfect text of creation, the attar of a sacred wilderness. The soft rind of it's beauty turns gold on the bodies of vein woman. The ermine proves the playfulness of God when he conjures up his milky dreams of plumage and snow, but the tiger's coat is a wedding song to the eminence of blades." I particularly like this book because I have an interest in psycology and this story is chalk full of it from the parental issues these people have to Savannah's illness. I'd give this a 9.99/10. It lost 0.01 because of a really gross passage.