Beach Music is the lengthiest Conroy novel yet, containing an expanding cast of characters and mythological-type tales featuring each. Readers might be interested to know that Conroy's manuscript he presented to his editor was almost twice as long as the novel in its final form. This novel offers many of the Conroy themes readers have come to expect, with the addition of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War as specific causes of atrocities by man against man. The author's inclusion of narrative focused upon the present, in addition to that focused upon the past through flashbacks, will offer all ages of readers subjects with which they are familiar. One way to approach discussion would be to separate readers into groups made up of individuals possessing a "first hand" familiarity with the various eras, i.e. World War II, the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Vietnam...