Read it in the Green Room
Livonia Chow Mein
- settingBrownsville, Brooklyn setting
Suited to readers who like multigenerational family sagas rooted in a specific place. It moves between past and present around a Chinese family restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and looks at how Jewish and Black neighbours' lives intersect over about a century.
Beta invites go out in waitlist order. One devlog email a month, at most — or just read the devlog.
Livonia Chow Mein
Abigail Savitch-Lew
The Green Room
Backstage of Livonia Chow Mein.
Walk in mid-chapter. The people of the book are there, as themselves, knowing what they know so far — and nothing else. Ask them anything. They have read exactly as far as you have.
A moment in the Green Room
Livonia Chow Mein · Abigail Savitch-Lew
The narrator
As they are at your reading place
You
What kind of place is this restaurant?
The narrator
“I’m at a Chinese family-owned restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where the Wong family’s story reaches across generations and the neighborhood’s Jewish and Black residents. I can tell you only what’s here at the start; anything beyond your page doesn’t exist yet for either of us.”
Their knowledge stops where your reading does.
Who is in the room
Anyone who has walked on by your page.
The cast
Any character who has appeared so far. Someone who hasn’t walked on yet isn’t in the room. That’s not a limitation; that’s the point.
The narrator
The voice telling you the story, as far as it has told it.
The author
As the book presents them — the mind behind the pages you have read, not a biography.
The book itself
Ask what it is doing to you so far. It answers from its own pages, up to yours.
Before you go in
What critics and prize juries said.
How it stays unspoiled
Nothing past your page exists.
The companion is assembled from the passages you have read and only those. A character who knows the ending is no one worth talking to, so there is no override — not behind a setting, not behind a confirmation. Your position is the wall.
Get the book
Already have it?
Bring your own copy
The ebook is not on eBooks.com for your region yet. An EPUB you already own works just as well: Green Room reads the books in your folders.
The cast has been waiting for you.
Join the waitlist — beta invites go out in order, and the devlog keeps you honest company until then.
