Crown

Bromiley debuts with a remarkable portrait of a jobless single mother as she navigates an impending eviction, pregnancy, and the watchful gaze of child protection services. Over the course of three days, Jude Woods attempts to keep her sanity and shield her nine-year-old twins, Evan and Virginia, from the harshest realities of their poverty. When she goes into labor, she makes the painful decision to abandon the twins to fend for themselves in the trailer park where they live, fearing they will be taken from her by CPS if they accompany her to the hospital. Other characters in the family’s down-and-out world include a young man at the hospital who carried his girlfriend there after she overdosed on fentanyl, and who provides Jude with unexpected and much-needed companionship in the ER as she patiently waits to be admitted. In lyrical and pared-down prose, Bromiley toggles between the complex points of view of each family member, from Virginia’s innocence to Evan’s burgeoning sense of responsibility and Jude’s poignant reckoning with their precarity (“Through these thin walls trickle bedtime stories, lullabies, whisper-fights. The good smells of cooking.... All, all, all this to be taken”). It’s a knockout. Agent: Jennifer Lyons, Jennifer Lyons Agency. (June)