Armaveni-Advanced Review

Written and Drawn: Nadine Takvorian

Publisher: Levine Querido

Release Date: March 10, 2026

Reviewed by: Ben Crane

Where to Buy: https://www.nadinetakvorian.com/armavenign has links to various book sellers. Pick your favorite.

How do you talk to young people about genocide? This is the question at the heart of Nadine Takvorian’s Armaveni, a semi-autobiographical account of the summer in her own teenage years when she learned her family’s story from the Armenian genocide. Takvorian grapples with the question both through the characters of her parents, who have kept the story from her out of a desire to protect her from the painful truth, and in the pages of the book itself, searching for the right way to broach it with her YA readers.

The result is a book that is powerful and personal, a history of an atrocity that is not well known outside of the communities it affected, and a tale of the generational trauma cascading through nearly a century of diaspora.

The result is a book that is powerful and personal, a history of an atrocity that is not well known outside of the communities it affected, and a tale of the generational trauma cascading through nearly a century of diaspora.

From it’s opening epigraph, a quotation from Hitler observing that the Nazis’ atrocities will be ignored just as the Armenian genocide was, Armaveni stakes out its position as a book not only about genocide, but about the need to speak and remember these darkest moments in our history. The story begins at the end of a school year as teenaged Nadine and her brother balance being American kids with being the children of immigrants. Their parents insist they speak Armenian at home and they attend an afterschool Armenian church group, but they also eat American cereal for breakfast, play American video games, and Nadine plans to visit Los Angeles with her very white friend, Jess. When Nadine’s parents finally agree to tell her the story of her great-grandmother Armaveni’s escape from Turkey, she decides she wants to truly connect with her heritage and she and her brother join a group visiting Armenia over the summer.

The book is a mix of vignettes of Nadine’s summer and narrated flashbacks to Armaveni’s life in Turkey before, during, and after the genocide, first told by Nadine’s parents then by family members she meets in Istanbul when she and her brother travel there after visiting Yerevan. These parallel narratives heighten the connections between the stories of the two young women.

However, in the wealth of interesting ideas that Takvorian raises across these scenes, I worry she might have set herself too large a task. In trying to be a memoir, a coming of age story, a history lesson, a multi-generational oral history, and an examination of diaspora, assimilation, and nationalism, Armaveni winds up stretched a bit thin. A few side plots are wrapped up too easily, and I would have loved to see a more time spent grappling with what they meant—especially ones about hostility toward Nadine from other Armenian-Americans for being too Turkish and her conflict with her Turkey-sympathizing teacher. At 330 pages, Armaveni isn’t a short book, and I can hardly fault Takvorian for having too many interesting ideas, but I wish she had chosen a few to focus on just a touch more, even if it meant leaving a few others to be examined in a later work.

The art is lovely throughout, with the simple layouts and monochrome pallet commonly used in memoir keeping the emphasis on the events depicted. The moments where mythology breaks in are highlights, lyrical oases to shelter from the challenges of the rest of the book, just as Nadine finds comfort and escape in the stories of her culture. Takvorian’s expression work excellently captures Nadine’s sense of being lost and not belonging as she searches for her identity, and her impulse to shut down in the face of unending microaggressions, both from outside and within the Armenian community. These same feelings are mirrored in Armaveni’s expressions as an ethnic minority in Turkey facing far more direct aggressions.

The art is lovely throughout, with the simple layouts and monochrome pallet commonly used in memoir keeping the emphasis on the events depicted.

It is those moments where Takvorian makes most explicit the lines she wants to draw between the past and the present that I found the book most effective, such as when she follows a sequence where Nadine’s high school class extols America’s virtuous multi-culturalism even as Nadine is being asked where she is really from with one where Armaveni is warned not to sing an Armenian song in public lest she draw the attention of the Ottomans. It’s here that Takvorian’s thesis and Armaveni’s raison d’etre are most clear. The Armenian genocide is rarely spoken about. Turkey continues to deny it ever happened. When we refuse to acknowledge or talk about our past, we not only leave ourselves open to the same dangers, but we deny those affected the chance to heal.

So how do you talk to a young generation about genocide? You do it gently. It is hard. It will hurt you both. But it is critical neither to shy away from the truth, nor to hide from that pain. You do it honestly. You leave space for questions. You leave space for feelings. You do it how Armaveni does.