Between Shades of Gray
SynopsisPlot
A knock comes at the door in the dead of night, and Lina’s life changes in an instant. With her young brother and mother, she is hauled away by the Soviet secret police from her home in Lithuania and thrown into a cattle car en route to Siberia. Separated from her father, Lina secretly passes along clues in the form of drawings, hoping they will reach his prison camp. But will her letters, or her courage, be enough to reunite her family? Will they be enough to keep her alive?
Story
About this book
In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina lives an ordinary life in Lithuania, spending her time painting and drawing. That changes when Soviet officers arrive at her family's door in the middle of the night. Lina, her mother, and her younger brother are seized and forced into a cattle car heading north. Her father is taken separately, to a different destination. The train crosses into increasingly remote territory, eventually passing the Arctic Circle on its way to a labor camp in Siberia.
At the camp, conditions are severe. The prisoners work in extreme cold, digging for beets and struggling to stay alive under Stalin's deportation policies. Lina uses her ability to draw as a way to record what is happening around her. She creates images that double as messages, hoping they might somehow reach the prison camp where her father is held and show him that his family has survived. This act of documentation carries real danger.
The story covers a deportation spanning thousands of miles and several years. Ruta Sepetys, whose own family background is Lithuanian, based the novel on extensive research into the mass deportations carried out by the Soviet Union in the Baltic states during and after the Second World War. Many of those deported were civilians with no political involvement.
