Some Thoughts on The Prince of Frogtown, by Rick Bragg

The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is a beautiful book, the final volume of Rick Bragg's memoir/history of his family, beginning with his mother and her troubled marriage with his father, the childhood of their children, to his grandfather, his mother's father, a story of a time long gone, and finally, this book, The Prince of Frogtown.

Bragg's father, a man tormented by the demons of his own alcoholism, was, as The New York Times Book Review suggests, "the dark shadow in his life." This was the man whose murder Bragg and his brother, Sam, plotted as they hid under the bed. This was the same man who, right before his death at an early age a death caused by his drinking, gave Rick Bragg a box of books because they were pretty and he remembered his son like to read. When Bragg marries and finds himself with a stepson whom he loves and thus becomes a father, he finds himself trying to understand and make sense of or peace with his own father. "With candor, insight, and tremendous humor, Bragg seamlessly weaves these luminous narrative threads together and delivers an unforgettable rumination about fathers and sons." He makes of this "dark shadow... a figure of flesh and blood, passion and tragedy, and a father, at last, whose memory he can live with" (back cover).

Put this book on your list--after Ava's Man and All Over But the Shoutin'.



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