A genocide almost a hundred years earlier echoes in the life of 16-year-old Nadine and her brother, who convince their parents to let them go on a family heritage tour to Armenia with their classmates in their afterschool Armenian program in Los Angeles. From there, she and her brother plan to travel to Istanbul, Turkey, to visit relatives and see where their grandmother ended up when she fled the 1915 genocide and how she ended up among the people who murdered so many of her neighbors. The journey depicted in this graphic memoir for teens takes place in summer 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and everyone is on edge. Some of Nadine’s classmates call her family traitors and collaborators for making their home in Turkey and adopting the customs, if not the religion of the Turkish invaders. Nadine’s time in Marsovan, Armenia, and then in Istanbul with her extended family help her to see why her grandmother is so sad and why her parents never talk about the genocide. Her relatives in Istanbul don’t talk about it either. Although they managed to escape – unlike so many others in Marsovan and 1.5 million Armenians altogether – they still face discrimination and fear. As one cousin answers when she asks about life as an Armenian in Turkey: “Oh…It’s…ok. As long as you’re not super open about it. We have some Armenian churches and schools. But it’s best to blend in, you know?”
Interspersed with Nadine’s real-time narrative are frightening images of life in Marsovan in 1915, when grandmother Armaveni’s father arranged for her to marry a much older traveling businessman with political connections to save her. Other townspeople are not so lucky. They are shot, set on fire, or driven into the wilderness to starve. Nadine navigates this knowledge along with the hostility of her peers on the trip but emerges with stronger connections to her grandmother and the rest of her family and an appreciation of the choices they made in order to survive. Included with the graphic novel are an author’s note, a glossary of Armenian words and a list of sources for further reading.
Written and illustrated by Nadine Takvorian
Levine Querido, 2026
ISBN 978-1-64614-636-9
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Lyn Miller-Lachmann is the author of the YA historical novel Torch (Carolrhoda Lab, 2022), winner of the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature and a 2022 Booklist Editors’ Choice, and the YA verse novel Eyes Open (Carolrhoda Lab 2024), chosen by Booklist as a Top 10 Historical Fiction for Youth, 2024. She wrote the picture book Ways to Play (Levine Querido, 2023), illustrated by Gabriel Alborozo, and co-authored with Zetta Elliott the middle grade verse novel Moonwalking (FSG, 2022). Her nonfiction includes a biography of Temple Grandin in the She Persisted chapter book series from Philomel and Film Makers: 15 Groundbreaking Women Directors (co-authored with Tanisia “Tee” Moore) from Chicago Review Press. She translates books for youth from Portuguese to English, including the 2023 YA graphic novel Pardalita by Joana Estrela, published by Levine Querido, which was named a Batchelder Honor Book in 2024 and the graphic novel Our Beautiful Darkness (Enchanted Lion), by the Angolan author Ondjaki, illustrated by António Jorge Gonçalves.
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