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CROWN

Evanthia Bromiley

A Novel

A suspenseful, lyrical debut tracking three days leading up to the eviction from a trailer park of a pregnant single mother and her nine-year-old twins - told through their voices.

This novel is set over the course of a three-day eviction from their trailer park in blue-collar America.

Jude Woods is a young single mother on the brink of eviction when she unexpectedly goes into labor and is separated from her precocious twins, Evan and Virginia. With no one to turn to, mother labors through the night while the children run away along the wild riverbank by their home. As the night hurtles toward morning lockout, both mother and children must reckon with what it means to slam against the ceiling of the American dream. Set in the laundromats, social service offices, and public bus systems of blue-collar America, this is the story of the indomitable spirit of a mother and her children as well as the beating heart of the America of which they are part - a chorus of waitresses and social service workers, veterans and graffiti artists.

Evanthia Bromiley has a Warren Wilson M.F.A. for Writers, is the recipient of scholarships from the Aspen Institute, a Lighthouse Fellowship, a Lisel Mueller scholarship and Elizabeth George and Carol Houck-Smith awards. She teaches writing to children.

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Book Published by Grove Atlantic

Comments

This is a book of poetry, every sentence offering up gifts. It is also a book built of deep suspense, a survival story of the first order. An evicted mother must leave her two children alone in the world while she goes to the hospital to give birth, and through the crucible of this crisis, each voice in this novel comes alive with ferocious originality and tenderness. Evanthia Bromiley writes at the intersection of poverty and motherhood better than almost anyone I know. Crown is an astonishing, revelatory first novel.

A roar with heart, steeled by poetic acuity, Crown reads like an epic of commonplace strife, granting both dignity and a fierce new voice to the mothers and children relegated to the margins of modern America. With this debut, Evanthia Bromiley has already cemented herself as the literary heir to Lucia Berlin.

Crown is a beautiful story rife with realism and hope.

[Evanthia Bromiley] is a writer who clearly has studied many great novels and then emerged with a voice wholly her own; a voice that shimmers with the kind of verve and light that arrives when a writer finds her true subject, then fearlessly accepts the challenge of writing about it.

A propulsive, deeply humane debut. Crown immerses us in a world both vivid and dreamlike, alongside characters whose darkest days carefully rendered become luminous.

Any writer who so creatively, poetically, and energetically ventriloquizes the gorgeous voices of children, and their mother, has my attention, respect, and gratitude. Hurray for Evanthia Bromiley!

Virginia and Evan's quest to get home through unknown territory builds to a taut climax that will leave readers breathless. Bromiley is also a master of the rhythms and realities of working-class life, in which keeping yourself together is a daily negotiation with bureaucracy and a chafing reminder that others have it worse. Though this is a story of contemporary life, it lives within the rich tradition of the literature and song of American struggle. This could be a story of the Dust Bowl or a city shelter; Jude could be the mother in Dorothea Lange's indelible photo. Full of ordinary royalty, shining with the triumph of staying human and extending grace even in deprivation.

Jude is, in the aftermath of the pandemic, struggling to keep her children sheltered and fedand to navigate the grinding bureaucracy of poverty. Evanthia Bromiley is brilliant on the brutal poetry of daily life, the quicksilver imaginations of children, and the cavernous depths of a mother's love. Crown is an astonishing debut.

Lyrical, unflinching, and emotionally compelling. Evanthia Bromiley has a particular strength in the way she portrays this family in jeopardy, never skimping on their emotional lives, but instead creating complex, layered scenes and moments of deep characterization. She has found opportunities to render beauty within otherwise bleak circumstances.

Beautifully written and quietly forceful, Evanthia Bromiley's debut novel, Crown, shines with compassion for all of its characters in their perilous conditions. They fashion from the landscape what is missing. They dream homes and wear small crowns 'woven of juniper and wild oak and the spare things of the desert.' Bromiley's book is concise and musical, and she has the heart of a poet.