Between Shades of Gray
Fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and her younger brother are dragged from their home and packed into a train car in the opening pages of this harrowing novel that begins in Lithuania on June 14, 1941. After a harsh six-week journey with other political prisoners, they arrive in Siberia, where they spend the next several months working on a beet and potato farm before being moved to a prison camp in the Arctic Circle. Author Ruta Sepetys examines Joseph Stalin’s barbaric campaign against the Baltic peoples through the experiences of a teen and her family in a novel that makes history immediate, intimate, and powerful. The struggle for survival as they face starvation, abuse, and illness contrast Lina’s memories of her life at home, where she dreamed of being an artist and was surrounded by the conversations of her parents and other intellectuals. Desperate for word of her father, who she knows was on another train of prisoners, and in a constant state of fear--for her mother, her brother, herself--Lina is sustained by anger, and by art, creating drawings on anything she can find. The riveting pace and dramatic tension of Sepetys’s narrative is matched by an indelible sense of place and wonderfully drawn secondary characters, each of who reveals another dimension of the tragedy that unfolded across those mid-twentieth-century years in moments that are sometimes cruel, sometimes courageous, and often, simply, so very human. ©2011 Cooperative Children’s Book Center
CCBC Age Recommendation: Age 14 and older
Age Range:
Grades 9-12 (Age 14 and older)
Format:
Novel
Subjects:
20th Century
Art and Artists
Families
Historical Fiction
Jail and Prison
Lithuanians and Lithuanian Americans
Oppression
Politics and Political Systems
Survival
World History
Publisher:
Philomel
Publish Year: 2011
Pages: 352
ISBN: 9780399254123
CCBC Location: Fiction, Sepetys