Reading Guide for Crown
A Women’s Fiction Pick
Mothers in America too often find themselves where poverty and motherhood collide. They have to balance the scales of earning money with actively taking care of their children. Oftentimes this leads to difficult situations and impossible choices. Evanthia Bromiley beautifully captures this modern American struggle and asks readers to take a deeper look at what it takes to survive today.
Crown by Evanthia Bromiley
A suspenseful, lyrical debut novel tracking three days leading up to the eviction of a pregnant single mother and her nine-year-old twins from a trailer park in the American Southwest.
Jude Woods is on the brink of eviction. Pregnant, jobless, and mother to Evan and Virginia, she has three days to box up her family's life and find a safe place to live. In the Woods' quiet trailer park, neighbors keep to themselves, but it's no secret Jude and her twins are in jeopardy--the eviction notice slapped on their front door like a white shout.
Poetic and distinct, the voices of the three Woods open to a chorus of waitresses and oil men, veterans and graffiti artists as Crown trawls the laundromats, public bus systems, and waiting rooms of a forgotten blue-collar city. In this mesmerizing, singular debut, the tenacious spirit of a young family and their community comes to profound and moving life.
To Drink
Spirits and liquor are considered a luxury when it comes to drinking on a budget. But, people have been making the most of what they have for ages. So, the next time you want a classic every man cocktail, consider these drinks.
Ingredients
2 black tea bags
1 cup boiling water
1 cup ice cubes
3 tablespoons sugar
2 shots of regular or flavored moonshine
Directions:
Step 1. In a glass, add the boiling water and tea bags. Let steep for 5 minutes before removing the tea bags.
Step 2. Stir in ice cubes and sugar before chilling for 2 hours.
Step 3. Mix in moonshine before serving cold.
Ingredients
6 oz high-quality lemonade
6 oz light non-alcoholic beer
3 dashes of orange bitters
ice
Directions
Step 1. Add the orange bitters to the bottom of a pint glass and fill with ice.
Step 2. Pour in equal parts lemonade and non-alcoholic pale ale. Stir to incorporate and serve with a lemon wedge.
To Cook
Bringing excellent flavors to you dinner table shouldn’t be limited based on your budget. Even with a sparse pantry, it’s possible to create amazing dishes you and your family will love. Learn how you can extract the flavor from ingredients you already have in your pantry.
The Poor Man's Pantry: 30 Flavoursome Recipe's
by Steve Page
A Flavourful Journey through the Poor Man's Pantry
Delve into the world of culinary creativity on a shoestring budget with "The Poor Man's Pantry." This delightful recipe book celebrates the art of making delicious and satisfying meals without breaking the bank.
Poverty, by America
by Matthew Desmond
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a "provocative and compelling" (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Oprah Daily, Time, The Star Tribune, Vulture, The Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Public Library, Esquire, California Review of Books, She Reads, Library Journal
"Urgent and accessible . . . Its moral force is a gut punch."--The New Yorker
Longlisted for the Inc. Non-Obvious Book Award - Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal
The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
If you like Crown then you’ll enjoy:
Nick Chen lives with his single mother in Washington. As he tries to reveal the mystery of his biological father, he realizes that life is more complicated than he thought. He soon finds himself facing the reality of classism, race, and family as he uncovers the past and what it means for his future.
Real Americans: A Read with Jenna Pick
by Rachel Khong
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - READ WITH JENNA'S MAY BOOK CLUB PICK - From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?
Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao's Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.
A Classic Pairing!
This American classic depicts the time of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the migration of families forced to leave everything behind to travel west. It is a story of survival, injustice, and the conflict between those with and those without. It is the book about the hard realities of struggling in America.
by John Steinbeck
The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized--and sometimes outraged--millions of readers. Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read
A Penguin Classic
First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads--driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.