Pulitzer Prize winning author Rick Bragg will be at Davis-Kidd Booksellers, 387 Perkins Road Ext., at 1 p.m. Saturday to sign copies and discuss his new book, ”The Prince of Frogtown.”

Some books take a while to get into. I keep reading hoping things will pick up, an author thickens a plot, strengthens a character – anything to woo me into giving up my precious free time to read. Alas, some suitors sit on my nightstand, unrequited, unread.

But not Pulitzer Prize writer Rick Bragg. Whenever I see his name, whether it is a newspaper article or a book, I know I’m in until the end. Maybe it’s because he’s a Southerner that his words glide so easily across my eyes. He vacuums a scene and brings it alive with metaphor and description that never causes the reader to stumble over something that feels contrived.

Most people barely have a life interesting enough to fill one book. Bragg’s filled three. His first was “All Over but the Shoutin’,” about his mother and his newspaper career, followed by “Ava’s Man.” The latest, “The Prince of Frogtown,” is probably the most difficult to read and I suspect the hardest to write. It’s about two fathers: the cruel, pathetic alcoholic Bragg grew up with, and the one Bragg becomes to his stepson, a boy who never knew hunger, poverty or cruelty. Bragg met his wife and married her while he lived in Memphis.

 The book teems with tiny details that make even a poor, gritty existence seem magical.

His command of description mixed with metaphor starts in the prologue, which I usually skip out of boredom.

But if you followed the water a meandering half mile to the west, through a dark, spiderwebbed, monster-infested culvert tall enough for a small boy to run through, all the picknickers and weenie roasters vanished behind a curtain of gnarled, lightning-blasted cedars and thick, dark pines. The stream passed under four strands of barbed wire, flowed through a sprawling pasture studded with wicked blackberry thickets and the rusted hulks of old baling machines, then rushed into a dogleg against a high, red clay bank. Here, the shin-deep water pooled into a clear, cold swimming hole, made deeper by the ragged damn of logs, rocks and sandbags we built just downstream.

This was our place. From a running start, I could leap clear across it, heart like a piston, arms flailing for distance, legs like shock absorbers as I finally touched down.

That’s just on a page in the prologue. It’s prelude to a darker subject, Bragg’s father, a complex man who was handsome, pathetic and cruel. It was as if there was something in him that wanted to a dependable family man, a good husband and father, but his demons were stronger. They tore through his family with a foul mouth and mean punch. His cruelty was mostly unleashed on Bragg’s mother, who endured his wrath for years while keeping her three young sons safe from his hand. His final vicious act before Bragg’s mom leaves him for good is disturbing and unforgivable.

The book cleverly juxtaposes Bragg’s father and his interaction with his sons to Bragg’s new relationship with a boy who becomes his stepson. Bragg refers to his stepson as “the boy” throughout the book, which is what Bragg’s father called him.

The only fathering skill Bragg knows is tough-love, settling fights with fists. Boys don’t cry. They fall down bleeding and stand up swinging. His stepson is like an alien, one raised by a nurturing mother, one who is coddled, who is spoiled with love and attention. Bragg and the boy are from different countries. Bragg is from gut-aching poverty where his mom skipped meals because there wasn’t enough food, where cold wind blew up from floorboards and bathrooms were outhouses.

The boy: “This woman protected her son from everything sharp. She even cut up his apples, lest he come into contact with a paring knife. He never lit a firecracker, and run away. He had never fired a BB gun at a tin can. She still ran his bathwater, lest he be chilled, or scorched. She sat on the edge of the tub and talked to him, so he would not be alone.”

For some strange reason, the publishers used gray shading on chapters in the present and  just plain white when we go back into the past. Most readers are savvy enough to figure out when the plot shifts to the past without colored pages to remind us.

The relationships progress, some into heartbreak that’s hard to read, others into peace and happiness. The problem with true stories is that there’s no deus ex machina to bizarrely drop into a story and save the day. Bragg writes with a crusty honesty. No sugarcoating his own shortcomings. They are laid bare in the book as he struggles to figure out how to be a father when he never really learned what one should be.