Brother Brontë: Dystopia or Hyperbolic Reality?
Some of the most effective dystopian writing does not attempt to prophesize. More often than not, it merely observes the state of the world. In this way, many dystopian novels of the past seem to have become field guides on how to ruin the world. Do you feel as though you are living through A Handmaid’s Tale? Does Parable of the Sower leave you wondering not if, but when?
Set in the small town of Three Rivers in 2038, Fernando A. Flores’ Brother Brontë presents a hyperbolic yet recognizable version of modern Texas. It imagines the remnants of a community flooded with infrastructure by a burgeoning tech industry and left to crumble under the authoritarian thumb of an industrialist mayor after said investors pull the rug out from under it. The result is subjugated mothers working in a prison factory to support their families who fight to survive against widespread poverty and government-enforced illiteracy.
Where Flores’ writing succeeds is in his attention to the world around him, extrapolating from our precarious reality of book bans, xenophobia, and scapegoating, and carrying it far enough to feel fictional. The novel’s setting in South Texas is an echo of the ongoing exacerbation of inequality and displacement by tech companies taking root in the area. Flores, who was born in Mexico and emigrated to the region at a young age, also gives a nod to the expansion of SpaceX in their “Starbase” facility in the area, showing how visions of progress often come at the expense of local communities.
While impressive in these aspects, finding Flores’ plot is an endeavor. Book One of Brother Brontë is inundated with similes and adjectives in a way that pulls focus from the characters and worldbuilding, which may leave readers to abandon the story. Doing so would be a shame, though. The narrative sharpens as it unfolds, shifting from raw energy to something more reflective, even philosophical, while preserving its punk lyricism.
Fernando A. Flores’ Brother Brontë presents an exaggerated yet recognizable version of modern Texas.
Much of Book One establishes the world, following Neftalí, the daughter of a martyred local activist, as she moves through Three Rivers still reeling from a police raid on her home the night before, in which they’ve destroyed a collection of books near and dear to her. She is joined by Proserpina, her long-time friend and former bandmate who scrapes by selling counterfeit ration cards to those in need.
Three Rivers is a burst bubble with an economy that rides on a fish cannery propped up by the indentured labor of local mothers. As Neftalí and Proserpina make their way through the neighborhoods, the novel captures the bleak ingenuity of survival. Everyone is something: opportunist, grifter, revolutionary, or simply trying to endure. Like the best dystopias, it asks how long people can live inside horror before it starts to feel like home.
The book unfolds like a web, with narrative threads slowly coiling into a central knot. Flores spends the rest of the novel mining the chaos of its first act for meaning. Book One ends with Neftalí reading the opening lines of Brother Brontë, her last remaining novel, leaving Book Two to dive back decades and explore the life of its in-fiction author, Jazzmin Monelle Rivas. Through her, Flores opens a space to explore creativity in collapse. Jazzmin is both a witness to cultural ruin and a conduit for speculative thought. We learn that Three Rivers is not unique — its suffering is shared. In Book Three, we return to Three Rivers. Neftalí is in mourning but also has a pet tiger. Her world is strange and broken, and she’s still standing in it.
It’s easy to boil Flores’ novel down to “two best friends fight to reclaim their dystopian border town,” but this is a profound misrepresentation of the book in full. Brother Brontë may follow Neftalí but is far more than a ragtag crew fighting authoritarianism. The reality is much more bleak. This novel proffers the duality of existence as both trauma and resistance through a series of character studies, not just in Neftalí and Jazzmin Monelle Rivas but in a group of tías striving to help their community, a commune of progressive farmers turned revolutionaries, and a young woman tasked with literacy as both pleasure and a means of building a future.
Through Brother Brontë, Flores presents a possibility rooted in modern conditions. Our rights — intellectual, personal, communal — are fragile. It’s a reality that many communities have faced and continue to face. Flores shows us a bleak kind of comfort: a void to scream into when protest isn't enough, and survival feels like the only form of resistance left.
