“America had sent a man into space three weeks ago,” author Blair Bronwyn writes in RUNNING BULL, a novel set in 1960s Texas, “but the Cook family was just barely getting used to having running hot water, a septic tank, and a functioning toilet.” For young Russell Cook, the America roiling with the seismic upheavals of the civil rights movement and the looming war in Vietnam is little more than a faint tremor on the horizon of his family farm. Russell’s concerns are more immediate: protecting his infant sister from their mentally unstable mother, while keeping the struggling farm afloat with little help from an abusive, spendthrift father. Born into grinding poverty and a life of endless toil on the brink of starvation, Russell is consumed by equal parts rage—at his shiftless father and a cruel, indifferent God—and wrenching despair.

RUNNING BULL, the second installment of a trilogy spanning four generations of a Texas family (though connected, each novel can be read as a standalone story), follows Russell’s coming of age in a world rife with casual racism, toxic masculinity, and the omnipresent threat of sudden violence. Russell, a bright student, finds a way out of his bleak existence through the Marine Corps and the promise of a free college education. It is the start of a journey that will lead him through the devastation of war, its ruinous aftermath, and a future that the former farm boy could scarcely have imagined for himself.

Bronwyn’s chronicle of a young man’s passage out of rural Texas to a world that offers salvation—albeit with a hefty price—is rendered with sympathetic but clear-eyed realism, meticulously researched, with nuanced characterizations that steer clear of lazy stereotypes. There are no monsters or angels in the novel; Russell’s father, Bill, is introduced as the sort of reprobate who is typically portrayed as an irredeemable villain but reveals unexpected, even redeeming, qualities over the course of the story. And Russell’s sister Elaine is not merely an adoring younger sibling but is given a complex—and heartbreaking—character arc of her own. The author’s plainspoken, unsentimental style recalls fellow Texan Larry McMurtry’s melancholic and resolutely unromantic depictions of the American West.

The novel loses steam in its second half, with an improbable string of Dickensian coincidences and a frustratingly incomplete finish that feels like a setup for the next book. Despite its flaws, however, RUNNING BULL is a profoundly moving and compulsively readable work of historical fiction, an unsparing but humane evocation of a tumultuous era.

Blair Bronwyn’s chronicle of a young man’s passage out of rural Texas to a world that offers salvation—albeit with a hefty price—is rendered with sympathetic but clear-eyed realism, meticulously researched, with nuanced characterizations that steer clear of lazy stereotypes.

~Edward Sung for IndieReader