Book Review: The Boys in the Brazos River Bottom

Title: The Boys in the Brazos River Bottom 

Author: Peter L.Scamardo II

Date: 2021

ISBN: 978-1-7375404-1-0

Length: 282 pages

Quote: "The boys knew their house didn’t have twelve oak trees outside, but it did have three pecan trees."

So they called the house Three Pecans.  

This is a novel about the summer of 1969, not as it's been remembered in pop culture, but as it really felt to three teenagers living through it. In real life we weren't all in rebellion against our parents. Some baby-boomers actually liked and respected our parents. Matt/Matteo/Matthew, Josh/Giosue/Joshua, and Tommy (nobody calls him Tommaso or Thomas) Ruggirello are three of that kind. During the summer all three disagree with Papa Ruggirello. Matt even speaks angrily and drives angrily away, just burning up gas on lonely back roads until he feels sleepy enough to pull over and be awakened and escorted home by the local police force (a first cousin once removed whom he calls Uncle Frank). Yet in their disagreements they respect their Papa. (Their Mama and their one sister don't seem especially admirable or especially close to the boys, but the boys respect them, too.) 

Not that the story is a pastoral idyll. In the first scene Papa shows the boys how to tie off a calf's vestigial fifth leg without hurting the calf (they were expecting they'd have to kill it). Further on we'll see farm laborers threatening each other's lives. a patient with an infected wound tearing the wires out of his mangled hand, Matt and Josh splattered with muck while Papa rushes Tommy to the hospital, and other gross-outs. Rural life is heavenly at time and very earthy at other times. Though the closest the novel comes to a sex scene is an accusation uttered by one of the quarrelling laborers, and the closest it comes to violence is that one of the laborers has a shotgun, there's still plenty of action and gross-outs. 

Nevertheless the plot element that shapes the story is that Matt is a National Honor student, invited to choose among full scholarships to thirty-five universities. He feels almost disloyal about mentioning to Papa that he might not want to go to the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University. Papa's first reaction is that he is almost disloyal for thinking that, but, upon reflection, Papa agrees to take the family to tour other universities, "as long as it's in Texas...and not the University of Texas." At Baylor Matt's impressed by the scenic beauty of Waco, but he's strangely drawn to the intellectualism at Rice, at the same time he's repelled by the elitism.  

There's an ironic nod to another well-known book about an Italian-American family. Mama Ruggirello doesn't own a lot of books, but reads the beginning of Gone with the Wind over and over. On the family's university tours, Mama finds a new novel to read, about people with names like theirs and their neighbors', family get-togethers like theirs and their neighbors'...only somehow the Ruggirellos get along without a Godfather. 

When I posted a short review at Goodreads, I noticed people recalling a different 1960s pop culture phenomenon--the TV show "Bonanza," which was produced between 1959 and 1973 and was also about a father of three very different sons who love and respect one another. The way the book's written, some noted, would be easy to adapt to a weekly prime time TV show. The major TV networks do seem to be ripe for another good storyline featuring a strong, wise father and three loyal sons...I don't know whether the author self-published this book with a TV version in mind, but it could work that way. 

If you like wholesome novels about credible, lovable White men doing real men's work together, you will like The Boys in the Brazos River Bottom.