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

"This is what you did, Lina," Annetta cried, her face smeared with tears, her hair still in its bonnet. She took her children's hands from Lina's and pulled their quaking frames to her breast. "You done pushed that Mr. Wong!"

Lina looked at Annetta, looked at the girls, robbed of speech. All at once, her body became so heavy she had to sit on the curb. Annetta blamed her.

She realized then what it all meant: the two boys flying through the dark.

They'd lit the match.

Someone threw a towel over her shoulders. Another neighbor called the fire department. Flames ripped through the Freedom School banner, blasted the rusted Chinese restaurant sign, and licked the metal beams of the elevated rail. They lived on Livonia under the rumble of the 2 train, which came through every half hour at night, each car bombed front to back in bulbous lettering courtesy of local tagger NEVERFORGET68. Livonia itself was a street where every storefront was boarded up, or the glass shattered, the buildings stripped and the plumbing exposed, and all around them, for blocks on end, the neighborhood of Brownsville was disintegrating: the parks littered with needles; the abandoned tenements yielding to nature, with dogs breeding in living rooms and rats crawling in the walls. The massive pool at Betsy Head Park had been closed since the Saturday a teenager had drowned in the deep end…

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.