Charmanda Reads

A Week in Berlin by Angelina Der Arakelian-Dennington
Would I Recommend: Yes
Read: 9/2-9/21/2025

I was offered the opportunity to work with Angelina Der Arakelian-Dennington through Upwork for the review of her new novel A Week in Berlin and I am glad I did. My job was to read and review, but I was also able to assist in some issues regarding eBook formatting. I am getting good at that, apparently.

I love me some deep trauma, and this book really had me in the first half. Whether intentional or not, this is a look at Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Badrig survives the Armenian genocide by some unknown intervention while the rest of his family perishes. He experiences flashbacks and seemingly very real experiences of losing his family over and over again. As he is trying to rebuild his life, he is summoned by a very affluent man to run his factory business. In this new iteration of his life, the flashbacks turn into something much more.

The best parts of this book are the flashbacks. Your heart breaks for Badrig over and over again. These flashbacks are where the book is the most beautiful. Part of it is hard to read as a PTSD survivor myself. Badrig tries to talk of his past, his trauma, and it is constantly struck down, told it doesn’t matter, time to live in the present. As you move through the novel, you find out WHY the other characters do that to our narrator, but be advised this direct rejection might trigger you.

The historical significance of this novel blended into the science fiction of memory time travel is intriguing. It does keep your attention and keeps you on your toes. The pace of this novel rapidly increases as the story progresses, and can get a little confusing. Overall, I did enjoy reading this.

Spoiler Alert:

I hate Josephine. Josephine is the villain here. She is the one that forces Badrig to survive, she claims she “loves him” and shows absolutely no semblance of such. Badrig is just a thing that she wants. She also erases his identity by continuously calling him his whitewashed name of Patrick. Josephine is incredibly selfish and this is all her fault.

Towards the end, Badrig becomes the selfish man. Destroying the fabric of time for all for his own motives. I started to lose respect for him as the book came to a close.

I appreciate this book for what it is, and what it tried to do. I would recommend this mostly to those that like historical fiction. There are definitely parts of this book that we are seeing reflected in real life right now. Regardless of where someone may stand, there is a genocide happening right now (more than one) and people will try to suppress it, hide it, and the survivors will be forced to live it again and again through their memories while being told “the past is the past, let’s move forward”.