The Prince of Frogtown

Starred review from March 3, 2008
Bragg (All Over but the Shoutin'
) continues to mine his East Alabama family history for stories, this time focusing on the life of his alcoholic father. Unlike his previous two memoirs, Bragg merges his father's history of severe hardships and simple joys with a tale from the present: his own relationship with his 10-year-old stepson. Bragg crafts flowing sentences that vividly describe the southern Appalachian landscape and ways of life both old and new. The title comes from his father, who grew up in the mill village in Jacksonville, Ala., a dirt-poor neighborhood known as Frogtown, a place where they didn't bother to name the streets, but simply assigned letters. His father's story walks the line between humorous and heartbreaking, mixing tales of tipping over outhouses as a child and stealing an alligator from a roadside show in Florida with the stark tragedies of drunkenness, brawling, dog fighting, chain gangs, meanness and his early death from tuberculosis. Juxtaposed with vignettes about Bragg's stepson, this memoir has great perspective as the reader sees Bragg, the son of a dysfunctional father who grew up very poor, grapple with becoming the father of a modern-day mama's boy. This book, much like his previous two memoirs, is lush with narratives about manhood, fathers and sons, families and the changing face of the rural South.

April 15, 2008
With this wrenching story of fathers and sons, Pulitzer Prize winner Bragg completes the personal saga he began with the best sellers "All Over but the Shoutin'" and "Ava's Man". After 40 years of self-proclaimed bachelorhood, Bragg finds himself thrown into the uncomfortable and challenging position of becoming a stepfather. Learning to have a son brings to light the chasm separating Bragg from his own father. Readers are at last allowed to catch a glimpse of this passionate and clearly troubled alcoholic and Korean War veteran, dismissed in the earlier memoirs as a deadbeat villain. Abandoned by his father at age six, Bragg relies on accounts from his mother, brothers, cousins, and family friends to piece together his father's story, riddled with tales of white-whiskey bootlegging, run-ins with local law enforcement, and domestic disputes. Here, Bragg continues in the vein of his legendary storytelling, breathing life into a father he barely knew while learning to love a son. Recommended for public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 1/08.]Erin E. Dorney, Rochester, NY

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2008
Adult/High School-Bragg revisits his Alabama hometown for the third time, following "All Over but the Shoutin'" (1998) and "Ava's Man" (2002, both Vintage). He attempts to retell the story of his father, vilified as an abusive drunk in the earlier works, and gives him a more in-depth treatment in an effort to determine what made him the way he was. While by no means sympathetic, the portrayal shows readers a man who had limited choices in education, employment, relationships, and, ultimately, behavior. Before he became an absent father, Charles Bragg was a good son; a handsome man with a sexy car; a fighter and carouser, and eventually a mean, spiteful drunk. Described through recollections of friends and relatives who knew him when, the figure who emerges coped the only way he knew how, with exaggerated machismo, in a small town that he never left for any length of time. The author's realization that he might have been harsh in his previous memoirs comes through as he views his new 10-year-old stepson as soft. Even with all the benefits of education and a Pulitzer Prize, that seed of the immature Bragg tough guy remains. The story unfolds in alternating chapters, shorter ones about the stepson interspersed with longer ones about Charles Bragg. The stepson stories have a '40s-something navel-gazing quality about them that could put off some teens, but most of the book, masterfully told, is the kind of dysfunctional family memoir that teens tend to love."Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD"

Copyright 2008 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2008
Whereas All Over but the Shoutin (1997) provided a tribute to his resilient mother and Avas Man (2001) chronicled his remarkable grandfather, Bragg, an Old World storyteller at heart, now aims hissights squarely at his much-loathed father. In an Appalachian village where bootlegging and brawling took up whatever hours werent owed to the cotton mill, the Bragg men drank corn whiskey, played poker, rolled dice and settled arguments with fists and knives and sometimes just acted a little peculiar. Perhaps doomed from the start, his fathers life crawls, runs, and staggers from an impoverished and roughshod childhood to a young mans tomcatting golden age to the abuse, neglect, and early death of severe alcoholism. Bragg attempts to reconcilebut not forgivehis father and his legacy as he himself becomes a stepfather to exactly the sort of boy who ought never be a Bragg; who, to his horror, wept from a boo-boo, or if he was tired. As the boy grows into a man, Bragg transforms into the sort of father he always lacked, and believed he could never be. A deeply felt and painfully honest portrait of folk, family, and fatherhood that will resonate withbittersweet harmony as long as fathers have sons, and sons have fathers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)

Starred review from June 30, 2008
In reading his latest autobiographical title, which alternates between the rough-and-tumble rural South of his origins and the contemporary suburban South of his preteen stepson, Bragg smoothly invokes colloquial pronunciations such as the dropping of the “g” sound in “ing” words. In the hands of any other narrator besides the author, such touches would seem stilted, but Bragg brings sincerity and dignity to the proceedings. He demonstrates a knack for building dramatic tension in presenting his narrative, holding back serious emotional fire for the most pivotal confrontations. One particularly memorable dialogue centers on his father's participation in the brutal sport of dog fighting and how one fateful act of alcohol-fueled desperation forever altered the family dynamic. In coming to terms with the cushy 21st-century existence of “the boy,” Bragg poignantly recounts a surprising exchange between his stepson and a less fortunate family at a roadside fast-food restaurant. As he straddles two contrasting identities, Bragg remains unafraid to demonstrate his vulnerability, and this nuanced performance perfectly matches the themes of his work. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 3).