The Prince of Frogtown

Family Trilogy #3

by Rick Bragg

The final volume of Rick Bragg's bestselling and beloved American saga documents a mesmerizing journey back in time to the lush Alabama landscape of Rick's youth, to Jacksonville's one-hundred-year-old mill and to Rick's father, the troubled, charismatic hustler coming of age in its shadow.

Inspired by Rick Bragg's love for his stepson, The Prince of Frogtown also chronicles his own journey into fatherhood, as he learns to avoid the pitfalls of his forebearers. With candor, insight, and tremendous humor, Bragg seamlessly weaves these luminous narrative threads together and delivers an unforgettable rumination about fathers and sons.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Southern, Autobiography, Audiobook, Biography Memoir

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Rick Bragg is the Pulitzer Prize winning writer of best-selling and critically acclaimed books on the people of the foothills of the Appalachians, All Over but the Shoutin, Ava's Man, and The Prince of Frogtown.

Bragg, a native of Calhoun County, Alabama, calls these books the proudest examples of his writing life, what historians and critics have described as heart-breaking anthems of people usually written about only in fiction or cliches. They chronicle the lives of his family cotton pickers, mill workers, whiskey makers, long sufferers, and fist fighters. Bragg, who has written for the numerous magazines, ranging from Sports Illustrated to Food & Wine, was a newspaper writer for two decades, covering high school football for the Jacksonville News, and militant Islamic fundamentalism for The New York Times.

He has won more than 50 significant writing awards, in books and journalism, including, twice, the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1993, and is, truthfully, still a freshman at Jacksonville State University. Bragg is currently Professor of Writing in the Journalism Department at the University of Alabama, and lives in Tuscaloosa with his wife, Dianne, a doctoral student there, and his stepson, Jake. His only real hobby is fishing, but he is the worst fisherman in his family line.

Reviews

[Lorna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prince of Frogtown is the third and final book in the trilogy about the history of his family and their home in Appalachia in Alabama by Rick Bragg. This book focuses on the life of his alcoholic father, at times heartbreaking, other times with the simple joys of family. The book is a combination of his father’s history with his relationship with his ten-year old stepson. The book cover is a photograph of his father at a young age, the Prince of Frogtown. Frogtown was the name given to the hardscrabble mill town in Jacksonville, Alabama. Rick Bragg’s reminiscences of trying to find his ground in fathering this boy, a boy accustomed to love and affection rather than violence and neglect. The thrust of the book is a heartwarming tale of Rick Bragg trying to understand his father, his son, and himself.

The Prince of Frogtown documents Bragg’s journey back in time to the lush Alabama landscape of his youth to Jacksonville’s one-hundred year old mill town, the town’s blight but also its salvation. It was heartbreaking to see the toll that was taken in this mill town. And we are told of the experiences of his father varying between humorous and heartbreaking. This is a tale about a son of such a hardscrabble life in Appalachia as he grapples with becoming a father to a young boy who does not resemble him as a boy in any way. This, as his two previous memoirs, is lush with Rick Bragg’s beautiful narratives. This was a beautiful end to the trilogy.

”Get six jolly cowboys to carry my coffin
Get six pretty girls to carry my pall
Put bunches of roses all over my coffin
Put roses to deaden the clods as they fall.” — Streets of Laredo

[Brina · Rating 4 out of 5]

With holidays of many religions approaching, my mind turns toward family traditions and memories that they conjure up. Traditions could start fresh year or go back many generations. Rick Bragg does not have many happy memories of being part of a nuclear family, his father all but abandoning his mother from the time he was six. In his mid forties, Bragg had already become an award winning author and thought he was a confirmed bachelor. Then a funny thing happened: Bragg fell in love with and married a woman with three sons. In his middle age, he became a stepfather and fight off the ghosts of his past stemming from his father’s lack of a paternal gene. Already chronicled his mother’s family’s history in two books, Bragg knew that to be a semblance of a decent father, he would have to shake off those demons. What emerged was a book telling his father’s side of the story, completing the research of his family history. It might not be happy but it is Bragg’s family, and the Prince of Frogtown helped him come to terms with how to be a better father. The Prince of Frogtown is the story of Bragg’s father Charles, for better or worse.

Jacksonville, Alabama is a mill town and relic of the old south. The town got its name from Andrew Jackson because it was in the territory that became the trail of tears. Eventually the town’s sons would fight for the confederacy and then for a unified country in subsequent wars. The town ran on the paternalism of the mill owners who constructed a small town and ramshackle homes for its workers. Signs advertised the need for hard workers with families because the mill would provide better than an existence in the country. Maybe that was true for most hill billies but not so for the extended Bragg clan who felt at peace in the woods. In many ways, the Braggs were not all that unlike the Bundrum family wirh the one exception that the Braggs had more of a propensity for alcoholism, that reared it’s ugly head too many times. When a region had primarily been settled by Scots and Irish and then due to national laws force these same people to distill their own whiskey and beer, it is asking for trouble. Rick’s father Charles was the youngest in his family. He loved to work with his hands, fish, kick back on whiskey, and tinker with fancy cars. He also had native blood which accounted for his swarthy looks and desired the prettiest women in town. In the vicinity of Jacksonville and Anniston, Alabama these nicest looking girls were the Bundrums, and Charles was determined to have one of them for himself.

Rick Bragg interviewed his father’s old friends from Jacksonville to get the complete picture of a man that he never knew. As youngsters, the boys got into their share of antics and trouble and crowned themselves the princes of Frogtown, due to the abundance of these amphibians in nearby rivers and creeks. If the gang were princes, then Charles was the king, his biggest thrill to outrun the local chief of police who had a vendetta against him for his entire life. Charles first drank whiskey as a younger teenager because it was always around. He had for sure gotten used to the drink by the time he married Margaret Bundrum and shipped off to Korea. The whiskey in him created a bitter and distant man who was diametrically distinct from the king of his teenaged gang. All of his friends and cousins arrested to this. By the time he returned from Korea, Charles saw ghosts and was also dependent on the drink, producing a man who was violent, antsy, and unable to provide for his wife and later three children. Drunk, he could not function. Sober, at times he could be a loving husband and father. Most of the time the drink got the better of him, and Margaret fled to live with her parents and siblings. Rick has few memories of his fsther; by the time he was six, the man was out of his life for good. As a stepparent, his main concern was that he also didn’t contain the parental gene and set out to research material for this book for the good of his new stepson’s upbringing.

Bragg perhaps did not have enough material to construct a book just about his father although judging from the stories his friends told, he could have written much more. The structure was done intentionally to intersperse stories about his father with vignettes about Bragg’s time with his stepson and how he learned to be a father of a ten year old on the job. Two stories I found touching were about the time all of the Braggs moved to Dallas to try to better themselves. Bragg felt like part of the middle class and thought that they had turned the corner for those few glorious months until his mother chickened out. Another anecdote was about the time Charles took Rick on the open road as a means to relieve his asthma. He did at times try to be a good father, so perhaps it really was the alcohol that made him unable to function in a family unit. Bragg wanted to be there for his stepson: attending basketball games, helping with homework, going on Sonic runs and driving a James Dean lookalike car at top speeds. He attempted to make this boy into a young man that he could be proud of because at the end of the day that is all we want from our children. From the stories of Charles Bragg as a man, it appears that he tried hard to be a good husband and father and might have been if he hadn’t taken to the drink. For what might have been, Bragg will never know, only speculate.

Families and traditions are what you make of them. Bragg reminisced fondly about his grandmother Velma’s meatloaf with onions and biscuits and gravy. He did not get to know his father’s kinfolks until later in his life and took to them immediately when he realized the similarities and rapport. The Prince of Frogtown concludes Bragg’s trilogy of books about his family history. It is truly a slice of Americana that he can leave for subsequent generations on both sides of his family who want to know where they come from. I could read a memoir a day because I find such accounts fascinating, and I have come to enjoy my time with Bragg. His penning his history has encouraged me to always ask my parents about their childhoods even if I have heard these tales many times before so I can preserve them, maybe on paper when I am finally done with my own working. Now that I have completed Bragg’s histories, I will have to find a new family saga to read next year. I find them as compelling as ever. In the meantime, there are the approaching holidays and new memories to create wirh my own family so that we continue to forge a foundation for future generations.

4 stars

[Cheri · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream.”

”I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn’t hold out any longer than that first poor fool did. It took something as powerful as that, as girls, to tug me away from this tribe of sunburned little boys, to scatter us from this place of double-dog dares, Blow Pops, Cherry Bombs, Indian burns, chicken fights, and giggling, half-wit choruses of ‘Bald-Headed Man from China.’”

”I don’t know what kind of man I turned out to be, but I was good at being a boy. Then, a thrust to the heart only bent against my chest, in a place where I could look straight into the Alabama sun through a shipwrecked emerald instead of just a piece from a broken bottle of Mountain Dew!”

Rick Bragg began this story of his family, their roots, in his 1997 All Over But the Shoutin,’ and then returned in 2001 with his second Ava’s Man. This is the third book in this story of his life, his father, who was The Prince of Frogtown.

Set in the mill workers section known as Frogtown, in Jacksonville, Alabama, this story begins in the 1950s, but there are really two stories - Bragg’s story of his own childhood, of his father and the struggles he and his brothers endured, along with their mother, with some exploration of the man his father was, his youth and their hardscrabble life. Intertwined with this is Bragg’s learning how to become a stepfather, how to relate to a young boy who is nothing like he had been at the age of ten, how their relationship changes over time.

If you’ve read either of the first two books, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that there is a lot of whiskey, more than a little bit of fighting, a jail where everybody knows your name, and almost everyone works at the same mill in this small town, and everybody’s daddy knows your daddy, and everything he’s done.

”It was a good world for drunks, then, and a bad world for everybody else. A man could rise up in his drunkard’s raiment at night, dripping poison, and pull it off in the day like dirty clothes. I often wondered if a man could look in the daylight on the drunk he was, would there be any drunks at all?”

Within each chapter are Bragg’s father’s story and a separate story about Bragg’s challenges with his role as a stepfather, and learning to accept his stepson’s differences over time. I didn’t have any problem with this transition since each transition is clearly marked with the heading of ‘The Boy.’

I loved Bragg’s All Over But the Shoutin,’ and Ava’s Man. While this was a bit different from those two, a reconciliation that, perhaps, his father had some qualities worthy of love and admiration, even if he hadn’t shared them with his son as much as he should have. And with that also seems to come a greater acceptance of seeing his stepson in a different light, perhaps as his father saw him. Different than him. The difference between the two men being that the son seems able to see that difference, and accept it, and see his stepson as worthy of his love, all the same.

[Terri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bragg's third and last book in the trilogy about his family.
Nobody tells the story of the poverty and hard times of living in the foothills of the Appalachian's like Bragg does. He captures the resilency, strength and love of his people, because he lived it. The good times and the bad.
This final story is about his father. When Rick becomes the step-father of a ten-year boy, he seems to dig deep within to reflect on the father/son relationship.....something he never really had the opportunity to experience himself as a son.
A wonderful read! Humorous, poignant and thought-provoking...I highly recommend this wonderful memoir!

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have forgotten just how powerful, how raw, how magical and how simply beautiful Rick Bragg's writing is. I never experienced the kind of life Rick had, never knew privations like his people did, never saw the rough side of life or experienced the spirit quenching miseries that they did.

...so why do I relate so much to it?

The best I can come up with is that reading Rick Bragg is like pulling back an unhealed scab and watching it bleed all over again. In the same way, it can sometimes hurt to read Bragg, but once you start, you can't stop until you peel away the final pages. His writing exposes what's deepest inside us; what hurts we nurse in secret, what dreams we cherish that might not come to fruition, what pain we can't let go of. This sounds trite and melodramatic as I type it, but it's only because I don't have the words or the ability to express how Bragg's writing affects me. I spent 20 solid minutes sobbing after I finished this book, and the next 20 minutes thinking about why I sobbed, and a final 20 minutes trying to come to terms with it and get some sleep. Frankly, I have no answers, except to say that Bragg speaks my language. His story about comimg to terms with his father is one I understand - but in a different way. He lost his father to alcohol. I lost mine to death. His father was an absent SOB. Mine was just absent.

The bottom line: we've all got issues in life. Bragg writes about them with the soul of a poet. He's a true Southern storyteller, and man, what a story he has to tell.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memorable quotes:
"We were driving through Piedmont...my grandfather Bobby was holding a bottle half hidden by a popcorn bag...I lived a long time after that believing you could hide any sin in the Bible if you had a big enough brown paper bag. I wish they made them people-sized. I would carry one in my trunk, or sleep in one, just to be sure."

"This is what it is like, I thought, to be the circus bear. You pace your cage until they let you out to do tricks. You talk about tuition, hardwood floors, braces and sometimes algebra, and see how long you can balance on that wobbling ball before you go beserk and eat the crowd. Sometimes you bust out, but never get further than the Exxon station before you go slouching home, for treats. You are a tame bear now. They will have you riding a red tricycle and wearing a silly hat before too long."

[Debra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick Bragg is an amazing writer with a gift for choosing the exact word or metaphor to make his point. In The Prince of Frogtown he examines fatherhood, looking both at his father and his stepson. His hard living, hard fighting, hard drinking father was a miserable SOB by most lights...but he kept good friends, and the love of his women, at least for a while.

Rick's family gives him excellent fodder for self examination. I'm glad I read these books and recommend them widely.

(This is the third of his reminiscences. They start with All Over But the Shouting, and continue with Ava's Man.

[Alex Bledsoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bragg's third book about his origins in Alabama, this one deals with his alcoholic, unreliable father. There's a huge level of ego masquerading as self-deprecation here, as in, "look how poor I was" and "look how hard it is for me to relate to my own son," which all carry the implied "look how marvelous I am now for having gone through this," when really all he's done is be a better man than his father, not a hard job given the portrayal here. Still, Bragg can write and create a vivid mise-en-scene, even if the subject of the book, his father, remains a prime example of mean white trash.

[Chrissie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again, here is a book that you must stick with; it improves. By the end I really liked it - a lot! Yup, this one is as good as the author's Ava's Man, about his maternal grandfather and grandmother.

The book is set in Jacksonville, Alabama, in primarily the 1950s and 1960s. Don't make the hasty assumption that this book concerns racial questions. No, it is about poor whites. You know the term Hillbillies and what that brings to mind. The author is writing about his relationship with his father and his 10 year-old stepson. To know how he should be to be a father he first had to understand his relationship with his own father, and this was very troubled. This new son who came to his doorstep, along with the woman he wanted to marry, was as far from any boy he ever had known. How do you relate to what is completely foreign? If anything he was just that kind of boy that had been a childhood enemy. To become a father, a good father, he first had to understand himself, his own boyhood and his father. Did he succeed?

Think poor white trash. This is very bluntly put, but you will get my meaning. Think whiskey and fighting, rudimentary education and no jobs, in the South, out in the boondocks, a small cotton mill town. THAT employment was one of being torn to shreds in dangerous machines, the pay so small you can wonder if it is pay. So how do you survive? Religion? Booze? Women? And how difficult is it to change and leave and escape a bad family milieu. Can you change everything? Not everything. To be clear, this is not a book about how one can leave and escape. It is a book about understanding that life he came from, and we readers learn with him. Do we really know what such a life is really like? Here is a window to look into.

I was thinking this - what makes some people change, escape, while others remain? (I have read that alcohol ism is perhaps inherited; it comes with our genes.) You know whiskey was on the table like a salt shaker sits there on a table. But why is it that one person can break the bad cycle of generations of drinkers and fighters and womanizers, and another cannot? What makes one person succumb and another revolt and leave? We also see Rick's two other brothers and how they react, but primarily we see his father and it is shocking. He drank, he always drank and he was mean when he drank and at the end that is all he did. You cannot but ask yourself why; why is it like this and how can this change and well, there is a lot to think about?! Rick Bragg looks honestly at his life, at his father's and his mother's and their mothers and fathers. He does this with honesty, explaining how each thing happened as it did. This is not an easy read, but it is worth reading - to understand the nifty-gritty facts of another's life. For me it was a life I knew little of.

What made it very hard in the beginning was that I didn't know who was who. By the end I understood. Pronouns are used and you can't quite be sure who that person is. You hear: “the woman”, “the boy” and “he” and I”! Who, who is I? This drove me crazy. There are alternating chapters, first one about his father's life and then a chapter about time spent with his stepson. It wasn't the change in time perspective but the unclear use of pronouns that threw me. You also hear the views of others, who knew the relatives, and there are lots of relatives, and this was confusing at times. You hear about other people too, because no man is an island. Police Chief Ross, for example. To understand Rick's father you also have to understand Ross and others too, friends and foes. Who we become is just such a blend of those around us along with our own strengths and weaknesses!

Yes, this is a very good book. I admire the author for so honestly revealing who he is and why he is who he is. The author reads his own writing in the audiobook; it feels that he is speaking from the heart. The dialect is Southern and I had difficult at times deciphering the words, but it shouldn't be read any other way.

Think if for once I could write a short review!

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this book from the library because it's a memoir and is about a step-father/step-son relationship, two things of interest to me and dear to my heart. I know very little about the American South, so wasn't sure I would really care much about it. I know more about China than I do parts of my own country, sadly enough. But Rick Bragg is such a good story teller and brings Alabama and Texas to life through his vibrant writing that I found myself not able to put the book down--and it wasn't just because of the memoir and step-father/son relationship. Recommended to anyone who is interested in small-town America of the past.

[britt_brooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of stories and anecdotes about his wayward, alcoholic daddy counterpointed by stories of Bragg’s own stepson. This is so thoughtfully written and effective in driving home the different aspects of how one can be a father. I just adore Bragg. The way he writes about the south, about family, it’s just so lovely even when submerged in sorrow. I met him once and he was exactly how I’d hoped - sincere, funny, and kind.

[Diogenes Grief · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick Bragg is a great American storyteller. 'Nuff said.

[Barbara Nutting · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fortunately, I read Shoutin’ and Ava first, so many of these people were familiar to me. Otherwise, I would have found it hard to keep everyone straight!! Many, many characters. The first two books were about his Mother and paternal Grandfather, this one told the story of his Father and that side of the family. I especially liked The Boy chapters.

Mr Bragg has a way of turning the denizens of Appalachia into something I’m not sure they were. I looked up the old timey photographs of this era and they all look miserable!! All those shanties and SO many kids! But.......his heart is still there conjuring rainbows and lollipops. Good for him to be able to tell such a moving story.

[Jim Beatty · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are some people in the world who are not necessarily good at life, if you see it as a completed work, but who are excellent at it one dob of bright color at a time.

[Linda Lipko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few can write like this Pulitzer Prize winner! He is the example to use for anyone who teaches English or Writing. He can break your heart in one sentence and cause an out loud chuckle in the next.

He can tear your heart out and then make you smile at the sheer power of his marvelous mastery of words, eliciting feelings that at the hands of a lessor writer could not convey the subtle awe inspiring depth of emotion.

How I wish I could write like him. His style seems as natural as Rembrandt crafting a chiaroscuro masterpiece, never using a white canvas, always gray or brown in backdrop, never just bright, never only dark, and the result is a portrait rich in depth and beauty.

As Bragg takes pen to paper there is a ray of hope amid the chaotic backdrop of an abusive, weak, self destructive, alcoholic father contrasted to a strong, able, loving steady mother.

Like Rembrandt's painting Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, amidst the pounding waves, there is life threatening turmoil and also calming force on board the ship, tempest torn praying for a safe passage.



In his first novels, All Over But the Shoutin' and Ava's Man Bragg took us on the rough journey of his childhood with an alcoholic father who harmed. Forgiveness of a man who caused so very much pain is difficult and it is only in the cathartic courage of Bragg to write about the angst that the reader understands the struggle of father and son.

In The Prince of Frogtown, Bragg is now a step father to a ten year old son. He inherits a small boy so unlike him and the childhood hardships he endured. This is a pampered younger child who never knew the flash of a father's anger fueled by white lightening bootlegged whiskey.

As Bragg struggles with the definition of fatherhood, he like many people from dysfunctional families know only what NOT to do and wrestle with what to do. When a parent of poverty has influence on a child of middle class softness, does the parent make the child buckle up and be a man, or does he accept the distinct dichotomy?

Bragg's raw emotion is written with boxing gloves lined with soft rabbit fur.

This is writing at its best, and like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird it is southern gothic in the powerful form of a work loaded in distinctive phrases and individual components that complete a unifying canvas of incredible power.

FIVE STARS.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

"He had been doing time in the county lockup when he got out the last time, sick and thin. But she was at peace, and it seemed so was he. There was no catalyst we knew of, no evangelism. It was more like he just got tired and decided he wanted to live quiet the rest of his days. She prayed he was truly over that life of self-destruction that took my father, but it didn't matter if it was permanent. Every day was a gift. Then an old charge, a dusty charge, resurfaced in the courts, and sent him off again. My mother was more stunned than brokenhearted, "'cause he done so good," and it seemed like she just shrank in her clothes. He disappeared into the state system, to Atmore, and I thought it would kill her. Everyone says that about mothers and sons, but sons do kill their mothers that way."

In this book that finishes the telling of his childhood growing up in a mill town in Alabama; Rick Bragg comes full circle. In this book he puts to rest (we hope) the ghost of his father. Charlie Bragg; married a beautiful woman, had three sons and abandoned them to drink. In going back and trying to understand his father; Bragg is also trying become a husband and father. This book will make you laugh and make you cry. I could smell the chicken frying, hear the women shouting in the church and see the stars in the foothills of Alabama. Rick Bragg can make all your senses come to life in his books; and break your heart.

"Old women call it loafering, and I've always loved that word. I guess it is just how we say the word "loafing," but the way we say it makes you think of loafers, of wearing out your shoe leather for no good purpose. Old women like to sniff and use it as a condemnation. "He ain't here. He's off loafering." It means you are shirking work and responsibility. To the men who loafer, it means they are free, free to waste time, to count mailboxes, and wave at other old men who, as the rear bumper vanishes in the distance, wish they were loafering, too. I plan to loafer someday. At least I hope to."

[Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick Bragg snatches you out of your own life and immerses you in his history in such a way that you feel you are his vicarious wing-man, only to realize that you are only witnessing the parallels of his and your own experiences. His trilogy of All Over But The Shoutin', Ava's Man, and The Prince of Frogtown is a must-read for anyone, especially the Southern Man, searching for their own identity.
There is an interesting comparison between Rick Bragg and Lewis Grizzard in that their individual characters were informed by their relationship with their absent fathers, who left their abilty to nurture their sons and love their wives on the Korean battlefield. That Bragg and Grizzard were each able to leap this chasm of loss and neglect to live their lives successfully is an example of the resiliency of the human spirit.

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg (Alfred A. Knopf 2008)(Biography).

This is the final volume in Rick Bragg's autobiographical series. When Rick Bragg marries a woman with a son, he finally learns the meaning of fatherhood. This is an abstract concept to him after his own childhood; the author's father was a cruel and often absent alcoholic.

This is a primer on the relationship between boys and men.

My rating: 7/10, finished 2009.

12/30/22: UPDATED REVIEW - I purchased a used HB copy in like-new condition for a nickel (five cents) from McKay's Books on 12/30/22. HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[Amy Kannel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know you probably get tired of my saying how Rick Bragg is the most brilliant, gifted writer. But I can't help it--it is the honest truth.

I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as All Over But the Shoutin' or Ava's Man...but the more it went on, the better I liked it. I found his relationship to/treatment of "The Boy" fairly troubling, but that improved as the book continued on. All in all it was an honest, courageous book, and Bragg can make people come to life on the page like none other. His mastery of the language is incredible, and his ability to evoke emotion for and with even the most unsympathetic characters is really stunning. [4.5 stars]

[Kbwilliams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as strong as "All Over but the Shoutin'" but still, no one evokes time and place among contemporary authors like Rick Bragg. He alternates stories about his much-reviled father -- a drunk who left his wife and three sons in the lurch -- with stories about him and his new stepson (his boy).

His portrait of his dad is more nuanced here, but the outcome of course does not change and you hurt all over again for his beloved mother. The stories about Bragg and his boy are delightful and fun to read.

[Kate Schwarz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this audiobook. It was a tale that wove together Rick Bragg’s memories of his alcoholic, coming-home-to-leave-again father and Bragg’s becoming a stepfather when he fell hard for a woman who had a few sons of her own. It’s his own reckoning of what fatherhood was, is, and should be. He’s surprised by his “boy”’s sweetness but it surprises him because there was no sweetness allowed in his boyhood. I loved the audiobook because I love how Bragg spins a yarn but also his voice and Southern drawl.

[Dianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a great book, a follow-up to his previous books about his family - It's All Over But the Shouting, and Ava's Man. I enjoyed it very much, a look into what life was like for those living in the mill villages of the South. My father grew up in a mill village in Macon, Georgia - he read this book and said this was so true to what was endured by the families during those times. And Mr. Bragg doesn't just tell a story, he paints a moving picture full of detail and emotion.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Rick Bragg's writing! In this third and last trilogy of his family memoirs he shares the struggles of his alcoholic father in an intricate merging of his own growing relationship with his stepson. "All Over But the Shouting" remains my favorite, but this is a good read with a powerful ending.

Reading that Rick is now a Professor of Writing at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa makes me want to go back to school!

[Mark Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick Bragg is easily one of my favorite authors and narrators (have experienced all his books thus far in audiobook format.) I loved this book like the others. The story bounced around a little bit, but the addition of his relationship with his new wife and stepson interweaving with his experiences with own father was interesting.

[Jan Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick Bragg is a down to earth writer who writes what he knows about, his family. He did not have a close relationship with his father and he tries to find out everything about him and what made him what he became. Rick used this book as catharsis for himself. Very down to earth and real

[Joanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rick Bragg writes with feeling, and takes the reader into the heart of his family. I wish he didn't always refer to his wife as "the woman" but that can be her issue.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

The third of the group Rick Bragg wrote about his family from the South. Yes,the hard scrabble south, mill workers and laborers. Lots of hard drinkers, including Bragg’s father. He lived by the seat of his pants, even before he went to fight in Korea. After that, he couldn’t settle. Wife kicked him out. Bragg grew up with only tales of the man, but not him in person. Bragg tracked down his father’s contemporaries to learn about him. He learned loved by his friends, hated by the law, and inconsiderate of his family. Pitiful.

[Jim Richardson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suppose Rick Bragg can be a little melodramatic but I really like listening to his narration and I can't help finding it interesting to hear about his family's struggles through poverty , alcoholism and violence. I enjoyed this final chapter of his story.

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading and absolutely loving Rick Bragg's All Over But the Shoutin' and Ava's Man, I have been almost afraid to read The Prince of Frogtown for fear that it wouldn't stand up to the other two. Finally decided to jump in and found that it was good, but not AS good. For me, this one just didn't have the emotion the other two evoked. Having said that, it was still a fantastic book. In All Over but the Shoutin', the author writes about his father, a man who left his family over and over again for the bottle, but that story turned out to be more about the wonderful mother who raised him and his brothers much more than about the father who didn't. A few years later and a few years older, his father still haunts him and Rick Bragg decides to re-visit that story, dig deeper and find out from others who the man really was. Rick now has a boy of his own; a boy who came into his life at 8 years old, and he doesn't really know how to be a father since he really never had one himself. To find his father, Rick must first know his fathers people, so we go back to rural Alabama a hundred years ago to meet Bobby, his grandfather. Bobby was from a mountain people who moved to town when the cotton mill popped up to try and better his life and the life of his family. The hard life of the mill workers, moonshiners and life in a mill village is portrayed in descriptive depth, so you feel like you are there looking in at Rick's people. Talking to people who remember his grandfather and friends of his dad, Rick finds the boy his dad was and a soft and human side of his father that he didn't know existed.
Another wonderful book written really well. Now that it's over, I'm going to miss the Bragg and Bundrum families like they were my own.

[Kevin Farrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, I did it again. I started reading a series with the latest book. Now, to work my way backwards to the beginning. Doh!

I love well written books about boys growing up. I guess this started with Mark Twain for me and I just keep looking for those great stories about boys and the stuff that they do. This book explores the boys growing into men in the author's family. Some of the men didn't handle the adult part very well and that caused a lifetime of trouble for several people in a tiny mountain town.

Great story telling and fun to read. Not all is roses and there are tough times with bad endings in there as well. To be real there has to be good and bad, doesn't there?

I enjoyed this enough to make sure I start at the beginning of this string of books. Series is the wrong word since they are all autobiographical accounts of the Bragg family. Call it what you want. I will read them.