Between Shades of Grey📖

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So I recently read this novel Between Shades of Grey, by Ruta Sepetys. This novel is hands down amazing, and really well written, but its also really important. The book starts off in 1941 in Lithuania, and this fifteen year old girl Lina is preparing for art school, summer, and fun. But one night the Soviet secret police barge violently into her home, deporting her, her mother, and younger brother to Siberia. Lina’s father is separated from the family and is sentenced to death in a prison camp. All is lost

Lina fights for her life, and vows that if she survives she will honor her family and the thousands like her, by documenting their experiences in her art. She risks everything to use art as messages, hoping it’ll make their way to her father’s prison camp to let him know they were still alive. 

It’s a long and harrowing journey, with love, hope, and strength. Really cliché to say, but it’s true . . This book really, I feel, shows the true nature of human spirit, and I remember at the end I felt so enraged, and sad, but I think it’s a great book for everyone to read. It has some disturbingly descriptive parts, but it’s important for you to read how it truly was during that time and place.

So you might not know, but 1941 was a big year in WW2  . .First of all, In June and July 1941, following the German(the Nazis) invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans occupied Lithuania. Remember back, Lina is getting ready for summer in Lithuania, and then the Germans invaded.  And throughout the book, there will be NKVD officers, which are the soviet secret police, who speak Russian . .so at time back then it was hard to communicate with the “prisoners” and the officers if you didn't share the same language. But was also happened in 1941, was Japan’s bombing on Pearl harbor, Hawaii. Both these events spurred up a much longer war. 

Everyone knows about the horrors of Nazi Germany, but few know about the horrors of Stalin's reign in Communist Russia. This book, really shares a part of WW2 that is’nt shared very much .. Lithuania lost around 40% of their people, and 75 million people died in World war two.

Between shades of grey is a remarkable book, where we can see the small, yet big perspective of the past. 

  ~Arya