LIVONA CHOW MEIN, amazing how long scumbaggery can go on without causing a revolution

LIVONA CHOW MEIN
ABIGAIL SAVITCH-LEW
Simon & Schuster (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the vein of Happiness Falls and Family Lore, a gripping story of family history and political upheaval centered around a Chinese family-owned restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn and its impact on the neighborhood’s Jewish and Black residents over the course of a century.

In 1978, two tenements on Livonia Avenue in Brownsville burn to the ground, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others. It remains unclear who set the buildings ablaze, but the survivors are convinced the culprit is Mr. Wong.

Who exactly is Mr. Wong, and what allegedly drove him to this extraordinary act of violence, is the question that consumes this novel as it plunges into four generations of Wong family history. First is Koon Lai, an immigrant who runs a Chinese restaurant on Livonia Avenue; second, his son Richard, a man desperate for his own chance at the American Dream; and third, Jason, a poet who seeks his escape in the bohemian counterculture of the 1970s, but finds himself an unwitting participant in Brooklyn’s gentrification. In the 21st century, Jason’s daughter Sadie returns to Brownsville as a journalist, determined to unravel the mystery of what happened decades earlier on the night the buildings blazed.

Joining together the present and the past is the community organizer Lina Rodriguez Armstrong, who was also displaced by that fire and who has spent the intervening years fighting for the rights of Brownsville’s residents and organizing a Livonia Avenue community land trust.

A stunning debut from a new talent, Livonia Chow Mein contemplates how the American pursuit of freedom relies on a collective amnesia and challenges us to consider what it would take for us to truly live in harmony.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: As debut novels go, Author Savitch-Lew picked a doozy of a topic...the arson plague that hit New York's working-class and immigrant housing, the war on the communities that were criminally negligent of their duty to provide landlords with their just and fair profits, and had the audacity not to be white or, often enough, to speak English. The communities that were forming and re-forming and growing also were guilty of demanding the landlords obey the laws of New York City! Can you imagine such arrogance? It costs actual money, money that could be profit!, to obey all those idiot safety and health rules!

It's a shameful, revolting tale of greed and racism.

It's also an immigrant descendant's reckoning with US racism and capitalism at their most nakedly unabashed. Ambitiously attempting to use dual timelines to tell different stories in different eras and (fatally for my reading pleasure) suspense-destroying levels of intertwinedness, the result is two good stories about a family dreaming the "American Dream" as evidence of its fictionality mounts in their faces. Had these been presented in sequence, the 1940s then the 1970s, much more could have been wrung from each era's challenges. As it was, the effort to keep the reader in suspense felt misplaced...obviously this situation worked out we've already seen that person in the 1970s!...so I was left sitting there with my teeth in my mouth wondering "why am I here again?"

Because both these stories are trenchant and apt for today's developing social landscape, that's why. I'm not the biggest fan of the execution but I am deeply interested in the Toisanese diaspora now. I liked what I learned if not deriving pleasure from how I learned it.

Social-issues readers (like me) encouraged to get a sample to see if your mileage will vary.

THE RAGING STORM, third Matthew Venn mystery from Ann Cleeves

THE RAGING STORM (Two Rivers #3)
ANN CLEEVES
Minotaur Books
$29.00 hardcover, available tomorrow

Rating: 4* of five

Listen to Author Cleeves read the beginning of the book!

The Publisher Says: Ann Cleeves—New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of the Vera and Shetland series, both of which are hit TV shows—returns with the extraordinary third in the Two Rivers series.

Fierce winds, dark secrets, deadly intentions.

When Jem Rosco—sailor, adventurer, and legend—blows into town in the middle of an autumn gale, the residents of Greystone, Devon, are delighted to have a celebrity in their midst. But just as abruptly as he arrived, Rosco disappears again, and soon his lifeless body is discovered in a dinghy, anchored off Scully Cove, a place with legends of its own.

This is an uncomfortable case for Detective Inspector Matthew Venn. Greystone is a place he visited as a child, a community he parted ways with. Superstition and rumor mix with fact as another body is found, and Matthew finds his judgment clouded. As the winds howl, and Venn and his team investigate, he realizes that no one, including himself, is safe from Scully Cove’s storm of dark secrets.

“A friend of mine once joked that the work of Ann Cleeves is the closest the crime fiction genre comes to evoking ASMR—the euphoric, pleasant, spine-tingling sensation that’s all the rage on YouTube. The books never get too dark, never venture too far into dangerous territory, but aren’t outright cozy, either.”—The New York Times

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Matthew Venn, Ross, and Jen go to the aptly named village of Greystone to investigate the murder of a has-been celebrity sailor. What happens as the investigation progresses is exemplary of why series mysteries appeal to so many of us: the characters do foolish things we know they're going to do and then need each other to fix the problems appertaining thereto; they confront their separate pasts in ways that both expand the seriesverse and explain the case; they think about their spouses, kids, parents, friends, dinner, what they will and won't do to fix the rent in society that murder represents (tracksuit pants? really?). So the reader who's been here with these people before now is definitely in a better position to appreciate the nuances and to find the little signposts the author leaves for us as to how things will play out.

A LOT of people I know would prefer to eat raw frog embryos rather than read a series out of order. I myownself don't care a whole lot these days, as spoilers are a matter of indifference to me so moving back and forth in a series isn't going to cause my circuitry to fry. Also, there aren't that many plots in the storyverse. Once you've read a few thousand books it pays to turn off the analytical part of your brain. Not everyone can.

Lucky me, I can.

So at {a late-ish point past halfway} into this read when the lightbulb went on and the reasons the murder took place got clear I wasn't unhappy but rather very, very impressed because the one thing Matthew needed to know was carefully kept hidden in plain sight. Well done indeed, Author Cleeves.

Should people who haven't read the first two books start here? I think those people would miss some very pleasure-enhancing nuances in the relationships among the team. It would not affect the solution of the puzzle in a serious way but it might reduce the emotional impact of a very big twist late in the story and that would be a shame. The gentrification of the North Dorset coast and its ramifications plays no small part in the puzzle's solution. That was very enjoyable to me. Seeing the way Jen, a single mother, copes with the pressures of motherhood-v-career is vintage Cleeves. It's all tied in to the way the case develops. Matthew's life with his husband Jonathan isn't neglected or foregrounded in this outing (!), but his loving musings about needing Jonathan (warts and all) ring true to me. For any eww-ick homophobes who somehow or another found themselves reading this review, you should really set your search terms to exclude me but also don't fear. Of sexual intimacy there is none. The focus is on the interrelationship of these men who're very different yet very lovingly connected. Not to say that there aren't worries and issues because that'd be really boring. I don't find these stories boring, in large part because Matthew Venn's background reminds me of a dialed-up version of my own, with a cold, judgmental religious-nut mother. That does increase my willingness to invest in the proceedings. This one was no exception.

The character I love to hate, Ross, just never gets out of the nasty, Babbitty little bro-dawg box he's been drawn inside. Thank goodness. I don't want to have to like him after three books learning to despise him, thanks.

A series-reader's pleasure. I think that, if Jimmy Perez and Vera Stanhope are your jam, Matthew Venn might be, too. He's quieter than Vera, more patient than Jimmy, happier than either.