The story may not be true, but it's truthful.

Chaco, a young Apache man born in the wrong century, struggles against harsh odds to adapt to the life fate has given him.

Torn away from family and all he's known in his young life and sent to the white man's school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he rebels and attempts to walk back to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where his people are confined. Tracked down by bounty hunters, he's beaten and dragged back to the school where students are to have their Indian identity eradicated and replaced by the culture of their conquerors.

With the help of a mentor, Chaco survives this first ordeal. School over, he joins the Marines and serves with valor fighting rebels in occupied Cuba. After his enlistment, he does return to Fort Sill, finds his "mother" dying and his sister living a degraded life. He also discovers that the woman who raised him was not his mother, and his father is the famous warrior known as Geronimo.

Geronimo has also died, and Chaco takes a vow to honor his father's last wish -- that his bones be returned to the home of their ancestors, a place Chaco has never known. Combining skills he learned from his elders with those he acquired from the enemy, Chaco rescues his sister and together they begin their odyssey, fraught with peril and pursued by men who would deny them their goal.

This is a novel with engaging and colorful characters, adventure, humor and tragedy. It isn't often a first novel resonates so well. I look forward to reading more of Darrel Bryant's work.