Over the weekend, full of emotion, I finished Between
Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys. This book opened my eyes and taught me
things about my heritage that I didn’t know, so I’m going to tell you about my
experience reading this book.
Book Genre: YA Historical Fiction
Paperback: 368 Pages
Synopsis from Amazon:
A moving and haunting novel for readers of The Book
Thief
Fifteen-year-old Lina is a Lithuanian girl living an ordinary life--until
Soviet officers invade her home and tear her family apart. Separated from her father
and forced onto a crowded train, Lina, her mother, and her young brother make
their way to a Siberian work camp, where they are forced to fight for their
lives. Lina finds solace in her art, documenting these events by drawing.
Risking everything, she imbeds clues in her drawings of their location and
secretly passes them along, hoping her drawings will make their way to her
father's prison camp. But will strength, love, and hope be enough for Lina and
her family to survive?
This powerful tale of heartbreak and hope is sure to haunt readers long after
they finish the last page.
Why this Book?
I’ll start off by saying that I am a huge fan of The Book Thief and I couldn’t understand
why it would be sold as a YA. The subject matter was deep and I felt a younger
audience wouldn’t truly appreciate the beautiful writing. I felt the same about
Between Shades of Gray, but then I
realized that both of these books teach younger generations about history and
compassion.
I bought this book because of the subject matter. I’m of
Lithuanian and German descent and I find ancestry and history fascinating.
Although the characters in this book are fictional, the events that took place
are very real. Between Shades of Gray
introduced me to the sadness and horror that Soviets inflicted on the Baltic states,
something I wasn’t aware of until now. In the book, a gifted teenage girl, Lina,
struggles to find her father, the boy she fell in love with, and tries to keep her family alive as they’re imprisoned in Siberia—working for the Soviets.
The Soviet’s reason for the millions of captures—they were accessories. What occurred
in the Baltic States was another genocide.
My Review
Ruta’s writing captured the essence of agony, horror and
defiance with sentences like, “Death had begun to gather a crop.”, “Or a
sadness so deep, like your very core has been hollowed out and fed back to you
from a dirty bucket?”, and “I had no tears. The sensation of crying would fill
me, but my eyes would only dry-heave and burn.”
Lina tried to get word to her father through her drawings—an
exceptional artist ready to learn the craft of art in Vilnius before the
Soviets captured her family. They rode in cattle cars, having to relieve
themselves in front of others, and subjected to sickness from malnutrition and
battling the elements. As Lina stated, “I was sure the insides of my bones were
full of ice. They made a cracking, snapping sound when I stretched.” She fights
to survive her 12-years of imprisonment.
While reading this book, it brought up some
Lithuanian traditions that I remember from long ago, such as Kūčios. Kūčios is
a Christmas Eve celebration of twelve courses symbolizing the twelve months of
the year and the twelve apostles. Also on Christmas when we were growing up, we’d
each have a wafer, plotkelė (depending
on the region), and
went around the table cracking a piece while exchanging well wishes. These were
wonderful memories for me growing up, and I appreciated reading about them in
this book.
Another wonderful thing Ruta did was refer to
secondary characters using character traits. I found it fascinating that the
descriptions and what the characters said were enough for the reader to get an
idea about them. For instance, she refers to one character as ‘the man who
wound his watch’, and another character as ‘the bald man’. Here’s a little
flavor of the bald man (pg 257):
Janina tapped the bald man on the shoulder, “I heard
you’re a Jew,” she said.
“That’s what you heard, eh?” said the bald man.
“Is it true?” asked Janina.
“Yes. I heard you’re a little brat, is that true?”
The ending left one thing unresolved, which normally
would make me upset but it went well with this book. As Lina fought for survival,
she carried hope and love with her, and that’s what the end is all about—hope and
love.
When I was young, kids would ask me what nationality
I was and I’d say Lithuanian. No one ever heard of it, and some kids even
responded with, “But I thought you were Catholic.” It all makes sense now…except
the Catholic part. During Hitler’s reign, Josef Stalin was doing his own
destruction by taking over the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia
and deporting the citizens. All of this started in 1939 with the first
deportation in 1941. While they were imprisoned, the Soviets destroyed their
countries. The Baltic states were in the middle of the Soviet and Nazi empires,
forgotten by everyone, and eventually disappeared from maps. The ones that
survived spent ten to fifteen years imprisoned in Siberia. Not many knew what
had happened because the Baltic states were occupied by the Soviet Union up
until 1991, when they finally became independent again. Under the Soviet Union,
if a word was spoken about the genocide, they would be imprisoned.
While Hitler was murdering millions of Jews, Pearl
Harbor was bombed, and Josef Stalin is estimated to have killed twenty million
people during his reign. I thank Ruta Sepetys for bringing this to light and educating
me along with many others about the horrible genocide that occurred in the
Baltic states.
This is a 5-star book and I highly recommend it to everyone.
History and Storytelling,
Bea
