Cowboys Are Her Weakness

A young artist can't resist the musk of an old bareback rider.

TRY

A Novel

By Lily Burana

St. Martin's. 383 pp. $24.95

Some years ago an official who had worked in football and basketball before joining the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association told me that rodeo attracted more groupies than any other professional sport. You see these big-haired gals -- "buckle bunnies," we call them -- dressed in boots, tight jeans and skimpy tops, leaning against the corrals and crowded around the chutes, hoping to score. And why? After all, rodeo cowboys are unlikely sex objects: They're smelly, addicted to chewing tobacco and generally broke.

Lily Burana knows that none of that matters. Her debut novel, Try , is a story of love and lust amid the dirt and cow pucky of the ring. She earns her spurs by capturing the roar of the crowd, the smell of the horses and, most important, the heartbreak of the rodeo circuit for both cowboys and cowgirls.

Women are helpless, she writes, against "the spark of romantic badness that flew up around the fire of rodeo . . . flashy chaps and blood and bruises and the glint of spurs." Her heroine, Daryl, 23, "short, sturdy, and unthreatening," claims that "cowboys were never my thing, especially the rodeo kind." But Daryl falls like a honky-tonk princess for J.W. Jarrett, a has-been bareback rider old enough to be her father, who dreams of winning the World Championship again.

Daryl is in rodeo country following a breakup with a boyfriend in Denver and a retreat to the family ranch near Cheyenne, Wyo. She hopes to heal her emotional bruises, but she finds that home is no spot of solace. Mom has already taken off and married a millionaire in Jackson. Dad's a broken-down failure, living in Colorado with his girlfriend. And brother Jace, Daryl discovers, is a Brokeback cowboy.

But life has its compensations in friends Kimber, a barroom floozy who looks like Miss Kitty, and Shawna, an Indian artist who lives with her tattoo-artist boyfriend. And then there is J.W., known to his friends as J-Dub. Daryl first spots him as he kneels for a word of prayer before a rodeo event. He's not asking to win, he tells Daryl later. Instead, he's praying, "Keep me healthy, Lord. And thank you." J.W.'s got plenty of "try," which means he just won't quit. In fact, the word "try" is a bit belabored in this book; we get the point the first time.

Handsome, if slightly scarred, J.W. is also courtly, soft-spoken, considerate, sensitive, honest -- you get the picture. Plus, he's dynamite in bed. These are mostly qualities you'll have to travel a far piece to find in the real West. Try is such a raunchy romance novel that you can't help but wonder, Do cowboys really do all that? Maybe the buckle bunnies are on to something.

For Daryl, the ultimate expression of love is getting pierced and decorated with a little steel ring in a part of her body that is not mentionable in a family newspaper. And guess who does the piercing? J.W. Your average cowboy would rather be thrown from a maddened bull and stomped in the face than undertake such a delicate operation on his lady love. But then Daryl goes all out for J.W., too. "Shoot, you'll even kiss me when I got a chew in," J.W. murmurs. "That alone about breaks my heart."

Try has got all the love-story elements of acceptance and commitment set against the backdrop of the rodeo circuit, and every page seems to bring up new trials, but that may be the book's shortcoming. While her characters are captivating and her setting reeks of blood and guts, Burana doesn't know when to quit. You find yourself wishing these lovers would try to ride into the sunset 100 pages earlier. ·

Sandra Dallas, former Denver bureau chief for BusinessWeek, is the author of six novels.