Livonia Chow Mein: A Novel

An ambitious journalist chases a big scoop and seeks to understand her Brooklyn roots in Savitch-Lew’s impressive debut. The story hinges on events from decades earlier, when Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, a Black Puerto Rican community organizer, ran a Freedom School to empower children of color out of her apartment on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville. One night in 1978, a suspicious fire breaks out that destroys Lina’s building and the one next to it, killing a man and rendering dozens homeless. For decades, neighborhood residents believe Lina’s Chinese American landlord, Richard Wong, was behind the blaze. In 2013, recent Yale grad Sadie Chin covers Brownsville for a small citywide newspaper. After she discovers that Richard is her grandfather, Sadie contacts Lina and begins researching the neighborhood’s history to find out what really happened with the fire. Her dogged pursuit of the truth is often at odds with Lina’s insistence that Sadie, a privileged outsider from Park Slope, can never fully know the community or what it had been like at the height of the Black Power movement. The characters are fully realized, and the story of Richard’s arrival in America from rural China as a young boy is particularly poignant. At its heart, though, this is an indelible story of Brooklyn and the recurring tug-of-war between residents and new arrivals over the right to call the borough home. It’s a tour de force. Agent: Jim McCarthy, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. (Apr.)