Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

Did you know that during WWII, the Soviet Union deported hundreds of thousand of people from the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to forced labor camps in Siberia?  These people, most of whom were women and children, were forced to live in horrific conditions while they did construction, manufacturing and farm work for the Soviets.  They were treated as prisoners with life sentences; their crimes were allegedly being anti-Soviet.  Thousands starved, froze to death or succumbed to disease during this time period.  After Stalin's death, these deportees were gradually released, with the last of them being freed as late as 1963. It was an awful event in human history, and the survivors of the mass deportations weren't even allowed to legally share their stories until 1991, when the dissolution of the USSR eliminated their fear of being sent to prison for speaking about what happened.

This is the setting of Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys. The story follows Lina, her brother Jonas and their mother when they are taken from their home in Lithuania in the middle of the night and put on a train to Siberia to work on a collective farm.  The conditions that the family must face are horrific, with violence, starvation, disease, and sexual abuse commonplace.  Interspersed with these events are brief flashbacks that show scenes from Lina's formerly idyllic life as an artsy teenager and from events that point towards why her family was taken.  Everything comes together at the end of the story to educate the reader about a little-known part of history and to send a powerful message about how love can help us draw on reserves of strength we didn't know we had.

This novel is both brutal and beautiful.  Sepetys' unadorned language brings her characters, and history itself, to life.  It's difficult and sad to believe that these events actually happened, and that people really suffered living in the inhumane conditions that Lina and her family did. It's not an easy read, to be sure, but it is an important one. People should know about this chapter in history, and anyone can admire the strength of the characters as they fight to survive against impossible odds.

I'm excited already to recommend this Between Shades of Gray to my students, because I know this is a book that will keep kids engaged from page one.  If I had one small criticism for this novel, it would be that Lina could have been developed a bit more.  While many of the other characters show the titular "shades of gray" in their personalities, Lina seems rather one-note.  She is fiery, speaks her mind, and is strong.  These are excellent traits for a character in a story like this, but she does lack a bit of vulnerability to round her out.  I wish I had gotten a chance to learn a bit more about the different dimensions of her personality.

Overall, I'm very glad that I chose to read this novel during my month of reading adventure stories.  This was a different kind of adventure - not the swashbuckling kind, but the struggle to survive kind. Action-packed and emotionally charged, Between Shades of Gray is a wonderful achievement in young adult historical fiction.  I look forward to reading more from Ruta Sepetys in the future (I already have another of her novels on my bookshelf, ready to go).