Excerpt from Livonia Chow Mein by Abigail Savitch-Lew, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Livonia Chow Mein

Dry summer morning, 1978. Smell of squirrel piss. Swallows chirping from a newspaper nest above a doorway. A long day ahead, on streets made into lapping rivers from the flow of unscrewed fire hydrants, below a blue sky with clouds like soapsuds. A day of chin-ups on the DON'T WALK signs.

Two boys walk home from the corner store. Cutoff jean shorts, white tees, secondhand Adidas. The older one bounces his Spalding off the brick walls; the younger one digs his fingers into the box of corn flakes for the plastic prize.

A voice calls to them from a parallel-parked car on Rockaway Avenue.

"Hey boys."

Eyes twitch over. Hands close around the Spalding, crinkle-fold the cereal bag. The two boys look at each other and then take three snailish steps toward the open window of the Lincoln, the older with his arm flung horizontal like hazard tape across his brother's chest.

"You want to make a hundred bucks?"

In the gloom of the car, a pale hand: between two fingers, a flicker of green.

Gummed like insects on a reptile tongue, the boys are pulled toward the unknown face: a pair of thin lips etched on a marble-smooth chin, the eyes blacked out by shades.





Lina Rodriguez Armstrong saw them: two boys, no more than seven and ten, wispier than dandelion seeds, flying under the moon. From the second-floor window of her tenement, she watched as they darted from roof to roof and then crawled down the side of an abandoned house, the older one shushing the younger one's nervous cries.

It was three a.m., but Lina had been awake, cleaning up the spills and crumbs from the poster painting party. On the record player, Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up" hummed loud enough to keep her eyelids open and a beat in her bones, soft enough to let the neighbors sleep. She'd fed almost twenty folks that night, and the odors of acrylics and fish fry lingered in the room. Her place had to be the most delicious-smelling apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn: almost every day her Freedom School churned out the crispiest fish fry and the tastiest asopao in the neighborhood, and long before the Freedom School there'd been a Chinese restaurant, the essence of sesame chicken forever baked into the walls.

Now alone, she should have been washing dishes and brushes, but instead she was leaning on her elbows and peering out the window, wondering to herself if these were Sharon's boys—Sharon had been her classmate at Thomas Jefferson High—and then wondering what trouble they were up to, and if she should go after them, maybe entice them with leftovers from the Freedom Fridge.

That's when she smelled the smoke.

It was faint at first, and she sniffed the muggy night air, wondering if it was coming from a barbecue. In the light of the streetlamps, she spotted the Livonia Avenue cat—the kids called her Miss Freedom and sometimes left her bowls of tuna. Miss Freedom was now fleeing down the avenue, her mottled body almost airborne. As the smell intensified, Lina crossed to the front door of her apartment, undid the lock, and yanked the sticky door open.

Hot black smoke socked her in the face; the staircase had become a glowing, spastic frenzy.

Lina cried out, stumbling backward. Then, sucking in her breath, she hurried across the hall to her neighbor's door.

"Miss Brown!" she hollered. "There's a fire! Miss Brown!"

Annetta Brown unlatched the door, the baby on her shoulder. After one look into the hallway, she pulled Lina inside.

"Get Debbie and Kim!"

The two girls were asleep by the open window, their bodies curled like oven-hot pretzels, the sheets tossed aside. "What happened?" they moaned as Lina jostled them, dragging them onto their feet. Together, they all made for the fire escape. It shivered under their weight like it might give out and send them crashing in a shower of metal down to the sidewalk below. The baby bawled, the women and girls tiptoed, and at last Lina and the Brown family reached the ground and ran across the street. Only then did they look behind them and gasp: flames had engulfed both 78 and 80 Livonia Avenue. Smoke gushed out the windows of the two tenements like streams of ghosts, gray bodies dissipating as they ascended, losing shape in the sky above the tenement roofs. Other neighbors ran out the doors with their arms over their heads.

Excerpted from Livonia Chow Mein by Abigail Savitch-Lew. Copyright © 2026 by Abigail Savitch-Lew. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.