Oof.
That’s the sound that I audibly exhaled upon reading the last words of Crown, a hot-off-the-press debut novel by Evanthia Bromily.
It’s a beautifully written, heart-wrenching story that closely mirrors what’s happening today on our streets, under our bridges, around our country.
Bromily begins her story with a dramatis personae and the characters are described somewhat differently than we might expect. Young Virginia Woods, known mostly as V from here on, is described as “energy, movement” and her twin brother Evan is a “cloudwatcher.”
And YOU are also a part of this story—right there in the list of characters: “YOU—float-flying on the other side of skin, blood, water—” Because this is a story about all of us, human beings, as much as it is about a young growing family about to be evicted from the bare minimum of homes.
Jude Woods is the pregnant—and imminently due—mother of 9-year-old twins Evan and Virginia. The story is told in chapters from the perspectives of all three—in their voices and in exactly the way they each experience the world: According to Evan, “You got to go twenty-six steps down to the social services office. Thirteen if you skip every other in hops, thirteen down to social services, which is also the courthouse and gets darker every step, cinder block, chop-chop, walls yes, windows no.”
The prose is lyrical and sweet, no matter the awfulness the characters are describing. The family’s bursting love for one another is everything. At times, the voices of the twins can seem almost too precocious—how could they possibly have such sensibilities? And then you are quietly reminded that they have lived ten times the lives of most children their age.
And Jude is far from a loveable main character. She makes mistakes. Messy ones. With men, with jobs, with money. Yet the twins are always there for her, unconditionally and without judgment. And she is there for them. There are times in the story when all three seem desperately alone together, invisible to anyone else.
One character sees them, though, and his steadfast gaze changes everything. The Sleepless Man (as the children call him, like some otherworldly being) lives in a trailer nearby, always on the stoop and watching. “Close your eyes!” the twins beg him. “I can’t,” he replies. We learn later that he also works as an on-call emergency responder, and as such he really does emerge as a kind of superhero.
As the story comes to an end, it’s the Sleepless Man who brings an aggressive energy and determination that is suddenly contagious among the dispersed people who live in the trailer park. Suddenly no one’s invisible anymore.
