Livonia Chow Mein by Abigail Savitch Lew

 

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

On Sale Date: April 21 2026

Pages: 368

I reviewed a digital review copy from the publisher

Livonia Chow Mein is a novel set in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The story starts in 1978, when two tenement buildings on Livonia Avenue burn to the ground, a fire in which one resident dies and many others are homeless. It is immediately clear someone set the buildings on fire, but who? The residents of the building are convinced it was the owner of the tenements, Mr. Wong, who wasn't a great landlord at all. The reader gets to learn who Mr. Wong was, and we get to know four generations of the Wong family. We meet Koon Lai, who came to New York from China and ran a Chinese restaurant on Livona Avenue for years. We meet his son Richard (which is the suspect of the fire), and his son Jason and his granddaugher Sadie Chin, who is a journalist and investigates the fire. We also meets Lina Rodriquez Armstrong who lives in the building, she is a community activist and she is the one who truly seem to know for sure Mr. Wong was behind the arson attack on the building, and when Sadie, during her investigation also meets Lina and the two clash on their different opinions of the fire. The residents of the tenement building are also in a fight with the city, they want control over the land with a community land trust, but the city wants to build expensive apartments on the land, which is not good for the close knit community on Livonia Avenue, so the story of this novel is also about gentrification. It is a novel set in different time periods and generations, and the slow burning mystery of the fire and its aftermath is told from different perspectives, as a reader you get to know all the sides of the story, as the chapters switch from character to character and also change in time setting. As a reader you also read about the family and community dynamics, and also the multigenerational traumas that live on Livonia Avenue. The characters are very realistic and truly have the feel and vibe of Brooklyn and I loved the complex dynamics and multiple layers of the story. Sometimes the characters collided and at other points clashed with each other. It was sometimes a bit confusing how the characters where related and in which time period a chapter was taking place in, but overall, the storyline was very good, especially considering this is a debut novel by this author, who also inspired the story on her biracial Chinese-Jewish background. I truly enjoyed reading it and I recommend reading this new novel!