The Water Is Wide

Inspirational..funny...heartbreaking..great book

This is a great book for many reasons. One of my favorite parts of this book is the dialogue between Conroy and the kids of the Island. It is hilarious! I laughed out loud on quite a few occasions. The personalities of the students come alive. Conroy's descriptive writing is mesmerizing, and the deeper themes are also emotionally captivating. Anyone who has been a teacher will be able to relate to Conroy's idealistic dreams and his frustrations about teaching a difficult population of students. This is definately worth your time!

Before Pat Conroy became a successful author he was a teacher. This book chronicles the one year he spent teaching in a two-room schoolhouse on Yamacraw Island off the coast of South Carolina. It is a moving and often funny story of one man's attempt to bring education to eighteen mostly-forgotten black children. Children who didn't know the name of the ocean at their front door, didn't know who was their President, didn't even know the name of the country they lived in. However the story never becomes maudlin and the tone is upbeat throughout. Many times I found myself laughing out loud. Mr. Conroy is an excellent writer. I recommend this book highly.

In The Water is Wide, by Pat Conroy, he does a great job of writing about his experiences on an island called Yamacraw where he is faced with difficult challenges. He shows us how he developed a bond with these childreb abd taught them things they may have never known before. I thoroughly enjoyed this book because he made you feel as if you were him and that you were one of the students watching from afar. This book also made me laugh right out loud sometimes, like when the kids would tell him he was crazy or he would try and trick them when he was teaching them something. This book also made me know why I wanted to be a teacher so badly, so I could make a diffrence in kids'lives just like he did.