Brother Brontë

In this energetic if uneven dystopian novel from Flores (Tears of the Trufflepig), two young women cope with their Texas border town’s draconian rules. When agents of Mayor Pablo Henry Crick, who’s outlawed all art forms, ransack punk rocker Neftali’s house, she loses all but two of her books, which she keeps hidden beneath her floorboards. One, a manual on hydraulics, is meant as a birthday present for Bettina, the woman who raised Neftali after her mother died. Together with her best friend and former bandmate Proserpina (their group is on hiatus thanks to Crick’s rules), she sets out to bring the book to Bettina at a state-run fish cannery, a dismal and noxious operation where Bettina and all of the town’s mothers are forced to work. Along the way, the manual is seized and destroyed by book shredders, and the women narrowly escape with Neftali’s other book, a prized copy of a novel by Jazzmin Monelle Rivas. Flores adds a metafictional layer with a section devoted to Rivas, who also published a novel titled Brother Brontë, but the story lines never quite mesh. Still, Flores sketches a vivid phantasmagoria of resistance, including a band of revolutionary tías who are secretly building a tamale cooker to circumvent Crick’s cruel food rationing program. There’s fun to be had in this literary adventure. Agent: Soumeya Roberts, HG Literary. (Feb.)