BookBrowse Reviews Livonia Chow Mein by Abigail Savitch-Lew

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An aspiring journalist uncovers interlocking family and neighborhood secrets in this ambitious debut.

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Abigail Savitch-Lew's debut novel opens with a dramatic scene—a fire rapidly engulfs an apartment block on Livonia Street in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood. Resident and community activist Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who runs a Freedom School in the building, not only narrowly escapes the fire, she goes back in to help an elderly neighbor, even as she's devastated to see all her hard work and the hard-earned homes of her beloved neighbors go up in literal smoke. Most perplexing to Lina is that minutes before the fire broke out, she saw two young Black boys, boys she knows, running from the scene. It later emerges that they were paid by a mysterious stranger to set the blaze.

That scene takes place in 1978. In the more than three decades that follow, the stranger has never been publicly identified—although residents believe it to be the owner of a local Chinese restaurant, Mr. Wong—nor have Livonia Street and its inhabitants truly recovered from the devastating fire and the many other economic stresses that have arisen since.

Enter Sadie Chin, a recent Yale graduate with a passion for journalism; it's 2013, and she's been newly hired by New Gotham, one of many flourishing online news sites. Sadie grew up in Park Slope, daughter to a Jewish mother and a father whose immigrant parents ran a Chinese restaurant on Livonia Avenue, so she feels excited and ready to cover the Brownsville beat.

Sadie, however, is taken aback to encounter not only mistrust but outright hostility as soon as she starts interviewing Brownsville residents about their policy concerns. One of them, when he learns about her family's restaurant, even accuses her grandfather of being behind that deadly 1978 fire. Initially, Sadie denies any connection—her grandfather was named Chin, not Wong, and surely there was more than one Chinese restaurant on that stretch of street…right?

But, as Sadie soon discovers, her Chinese family were outsiders in a neighborhood that was in the process of shifting from being predominantly Jewish to mostly Black, and prejudices ran rampant on all sides. As she researches the neighborhood's history, she also investigates her own. Sadie hopes to understand her own story a little better and also to regain the trust of the community, whose passionate longtime residents like Lina and her mentee Tyrell could use an advocate in the press to help garner more attention for their ideas for community renewal. Her growing knowledge of her family's complicity in the neighborhood's recent struggles only strengthen Sadie's resolve to do the right thing by Brownsville, even as it risks disrupting her own seemingly steady family dynamics.

Livonia Chow Mein is an ambitious novel, and one that requires well-deserved attention on the part of readers. The narrative shifts frequently among characters—including Lida, Sadie, and various members of Sadie's family, among others—and time frames. Although the narrative perspectives are usually clearly broadcast, the chronology often needs to be determined from context clues that could be easily missed. Savitch-Lew also has clearly done her homework on everything from Chinese immigration tactics to the benefits of community land trusts (see Beyond the Book), and at times the novel wears its research a little too much on its sleeve—one chapter, for example, opens with a mini-survey on the philosophy and legacy of urban planner Robert Moses.

That said, the novel's strong emotional core will reward and resonate with diligent readers, and there's certainly no shortage of weighty topics for book clubs to discuss and debate. At once a historical saga, family drama, cultural commentary, and even a mystery of sorts, Livonia Chow Mein is a portrait of a neighborhood and its proud but challenged residents that won't soon be forgotten.

This review first ran in the April 22, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.