In the oppressive near-future landscape of Brother Bronte, Three Rivers, Texas stands as a grotesque monument to late-stage capitalism gone catastrophically wrong. Here, in the year 2038, Fernando A. Flores unveils his most ambitious vision yet—a world where literature is contraband, mothers are conscripted labor, and volcanic ash blots out the sun. Despite these bleak circumstances, the novel pulses with humanity through its masterful portrayal of friendship and resistance.
Building on the surrealist tendencies and border town settings he explored in Tears of the Trufflepig and the short story collection Valleyesque, Flores has crafted a world both hauntingly familiar and disturbingly strange. What elevates this dystopian tale above genre conventions is Flores’s electric prose style—equal parts gritty realism and hallucinatory vision—and his unwavering commitment to characters marginalized by systems of power.
The novel’s greatness lies in how it transforms familiar dystopian tropes into something fresh and vital through an inventive narrative structure, unforgettable characters, and a deep meditation on authorship and women’s voices.
The Last Readers of Three Rivers
The novel centers on Neftalí Barrientos, one of the few remaining literate citizens of Three Rivers, and her friend Proserpina Khalifa, former bandmates in the punk group Missus Batches. As women struggling to survive in an increasingly authoritarian landscape, they navigate a world where Mayor Pablo Henry Crick’s police force—armed with bayonet rifles and book shredders—hunts down any remaining literature.
When we meet Neftalí, police have just ransacked her childhood home for contraband books, but she’s managed to save a rare novel: Brother Bronte by Jazzmin Monelle Rivas, a mysterious author whose works are particularly sought after by the authorities. This book-within-a-book becomes the novel’s thematic anchor, telling the story of twin sisters at a boarding school who discover that works written by the Brontë sisters have been falsely attributed to their brother.
Flores weaves three narrative strands with remarkable skill:
- The daily struggles of Neftalí and Proserpina in Three Rivers
- The emergence of resistance against Mayor Crick
- The story of Jazzmin Monelle Rivas herself and how her novel came to be
This structure allows Flores to explore how stories survive in hostile environments and how women’s authorship is repeatedly erased or appropriated—themes that resonate powerfully with our present moment despite the futuristic setting.
Literary Resistance in an Illiterate World
What makes Brother Bronte transcend typical dystopian fiction is its unwavering belief in art as resistance. When Neftalí encounters Mama—a wounded Bengal tiger living in an abandoned barn—the relationship between them becomes symbolic of the wild, untamable nature of stories themselves. Meanwhile, a network of “tías” (aunts) who make tamales for the community represent the underground networks of care that sustain resistance.
Flores demonstrates exceptional skill in developing these memorable characters:
- Neftalí: Determined guardian of literature who speaks with her dead mother
- Proserpina: A drummer with a shaved head who secretly reproduces banned texts
- Alexei/Tolstoyevsky: Former bassist turned collaborator with the regime
- The Triplets: Three identical boys who function as messengers and witnesses
- Bettina: Neftalí’s surrogate mother, recently released from forced labor at the fish cannery
- Moira and Phoebe: Twin sisters separated by circumstance, reunited by revolution
Through these complex characters, Flores explores themes of motherhood, political complicity, and the transformative power of stories. Even more impressive is how the novel never resorts to simplistic morality—characters make compromises in harsh circumstances, revealing the genuine difficulties of maintaining integrity under oppression.
Language That Defies Convention
Flores’s prose style is the novel’s greatest triumph. He combines vernacular Southwestern speech patterns with surrealist imagery and sudden bursts of lyricism:
“Rain fell hard like slabs of ham as a squad car pulled into the nearly abandoned neighborhood surrounding Angélica Street. The car flashed its swampy red and blue lights over muck-covered potholes and downed serpentine power lines.”
This opening sentence encapsulates everything that makes Flores’s style distinctive—unexpected similes, vivid sensory details, and a cinematic eye for the grotesque beauty of decay. His style also incorporates:
- Code-switching between English and Spanish without translation
- Visceral descriptions of the physical toll of poverty and oppression
- Moments of magical realism where reality seems to fold open
The novel’s tripartite structure allows Flores to showcase his versatility, shifting registers from the street-level grit of Three Rivers to the more traditionally literary passages in the excerpts from Rivas’s fictional novels. This layering of styles creates a rich textual landscape that mirrors the novel’s thematic concerns with authorship and authenticity.
Critiques and Considerations
While Brother Bronte is a remarkable achievement, it does have flaws worth addressing. The middle section occasionally meanders with tangential character histories that, while interesting, slow the narrative momentum. Some readers may find the nested narratives initially disorienting, particularly as the novel shifts between Neftalí’s story and extensive excerpts from fictional author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas’s work.
Additionally, the novel introduces multiple characters in rapid succession, which can make it challenging to track relationships and motivations. These issues are minor compared to the novel’s strengths but may present obstacles for some readers.
Perhaps the most valid criticism is that Flores sometimes sacrifices plot clarity for atmospheric effect. The novel’s conclusion, while emotionally satisfying, leaves several narrative threads intentionally unresolved—a choice that honors the messy reality of resistance movements but may frustrate readers seeking more conventional closure.
A Literary Legacy in Dangerous Times
The novel’s most profound theme is the persistence of women’s voices despite systems designed to silence them. By creating a fictional author (Jazzmin Monelle Rivas) whose works survive underground circulation, Flores pays homage to real women writers whose works have been suppressed, forgotten, or attributed to men.
This exploration of authorship extends to the physical form of books themselves. Throughout Brother Bronte, characters treasure the materiality of books—the feel of pages, the smell of binding glue, the weight of hardcovers. In a world where digital technology has been weaponized against citizens, physical books represent a form of resistance that cannot be easily surveilled or controlled.
Flores’s background as a bookseller (he worked at Austin’s Malvern Books) infuses these passages with authenticity. The novel becomes, in part, a love letter to independent bookstores and the communities they foster.
Standing Among Contemporaries
Brother Bronte places Flores in conversation with other contemporary writers exploring dystopian near-futures and border identities:
- Like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it depicts environmental collapse without surrendering to nihilism
- Similar to Carmen Maria Machado’s work, it explores women’s stories as sites of both trauma and power
- It shares concerns with Raven Leilani’s Luster about art-making in precarious circumstances
- Echoes the linguistic experimentation of Cristina Rivera Garza’s border narratives
What distinguishes Flores’s novel is its specifically Texan perspective on dystopia—a viewpoint that understands borders as both arbitrary political constructs and lived realities. The contrasts between Three Rivers and neighboring George West (which has rejected privatization) offer a nuanced exploration of how communities respond differently to systemic collapse.
Final Assessment
Brother Bronte is a triumph of imagination and craft that confirms Flores as one of our most original contemporary novelists. By combining dystopian world-building with profound meditations on authorship, he has created a work that feels both timely and timeless.
The novel’s greatest strength is its ability to maintain hope without sentimentality. In a narrative landscape filled with violence, ecological disaster, and authoritarianism, Flores never loses sight of the small acts of care and creation that make resistance possible—a message that resonates powerfully in our own precarious present.
For readers willing to surrender to its unique rhythms and layered narratives, Brother Brontë offers a reading experience unlike any other: challenging, unsettling, and ultimately affirming the power of stories to sustain us in dark times.
Brother Brontë isn’t just about the end of the world—it’s about what remains when official narratives collapse and communities must write new stories to survive. In giving us this vision, Flores has written not just a dystopian novel but a survival guide for our increasingly uncertain future.
