Review: Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother slowly make their way north, crossing the Arctic Circle, to a work camp in the coldest reaches of Siberia. Here they are forced, under Stalin's orders, to dig for beets and fight for their lives under the cruelest of conditions.

Lina finds solace in her art, meticulously--and at great risk--documenting events by drawing, hoping these messages will make their way to her father's prison camp to let him know they are still alive. It is a long and harrowing journey, spanning years and covering 6,500 miles, but it is through incredible strength, love, and hope that Lina ultimately survives.Between Shades of Gray is a novel that will steal your breath and capture your heart.

Between Shades of Gray is one of those books that shock you through the brutal lack of humanity. The title truly is accurate in that it is in a very grim setting. Truth be told, I almost had trouble going back to the book the day after I started reading because it truly was too gray. I also found that I wasn't particularly emotionally attached. It wasn't that it was because I haven't had the experience of going to a concentration camp. Of course I haven't and I desperately hope that nobody in the future ever is forced to. It was merely that Lina seemed detached. To me, a rather large part of the book almost seemed like an objective history book on concentration camps. Yes, it was horrible, but I didn't particularly feel the horror of it through Lina. 

Well, for the first part anyways. The ending was outstanding. I was hit by the emotion in the end. As people died and hope began to dwindle... It's hard to think of it as if it actually happened and much easier to think of it as a fiction book. I loved the emotion Sepetys weaved. It was so touching and heart-breaking. A really well done ending.

The love story as well! It wasn't at the forefront of the story, which made it even more precious. It was so sweet. I wanted them to get together sooooo much. With all the horror around them, there had to be some hope, right? A beam of light? It just seemed to complete the story. It truly was just what the story needed.

Like many historical war novels, Lina had flashbacks of the good ol' days. Shown in italics to differentiate from the present, she often remembered moments with her art and with her family. It was touching and a bit of a contrast from the grim scenes of the rest of the novel. Unfortunately, I often found it a little choppy. There were times where I thought that the memory really did accent the present event and that it flowed nicely into it. Unfortunately, there were times that I didn't particularly enjoy the flashback. Sometimes it felt like - not that it was forced - but it seemed quite random. I'm sure had I thought about it, I could have figured out a connection, but in the moment reading it, I didn't really get it and it broke my flow of concentration.

Between Shades of Gray certainly did give me knowledge of the lesser known side of World War II. It wasn't in the fact that it followed the perpetrators but that it followed the Lithuanians, deported by the Soviets. Normally, when I think of World War II(and I'm assuming most other people think about this as well), I think Germans, Nazis, Jews. Maybe Pearl Harbor. Sepetys showed the less known story of the Lithuanians and that made this book unique.

I would certainly recommend this book to history lovers. To many readers, I imagine that this book has the potential to be rather boring, but the moving scenes at the end and the grim truth of the past certainly make it worth it. To me, anyhow. 4/5 stars.