"Between Shades Of Gray" by Ruta Sepetys
Between Shades of Gray begins when the young Lina’s family together with other Lithuanian families was taken away by the NKVD officials on the order of Joseph Stalin who had recently annexed these tiny nations with Soviet Union. The suspected families of anti-soviet activists, higher ranked officers, professionals and even librarians had been arrested by the NKVDs. These people had been separated by men as a group and women, children and physically unfit people as other group. Then they were loaded in the cattle car and transported to Russia to be sold as slaves or forced to work on the beet and potato fields confiscated from the peasants. Separated from her father, Lina together with her mother and younger brother was sent to the fields and forced to work with other people who were already brought up from the same circumstances. There people were starved and struggled a lot for their daily bread. After few years of struggling in the fields, Lina’s family had been moved to a gruesome frozen work camp to build barracks. The only relief to Lina was her art, she drew the places they were moved, happiness and struggles among the people and the pictures she had seen every day and hoped one day that would be the key to the world to know those hidden history.
Reading historical novels had always been enjoyable to me until I completed reading the last page of the novel Between Shades of Gray. It was a heart wrenching hidden story of the helpless people of tiny nations Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia who had been forced to give up their nation and had been held against their will. This is a wonderful book which holds the history which had been hidden for several decades from rest of the world. This novel documents the devastating moments of the Lithuanian’s lives and a cruellest face of Soviet regime lead by Joeph Stalin. Narrated by a young Lithuanian girl named Lina who posses an excellent art skills and dreams on her exciting future, the story travels along with the happiest moments of the Lithuanians and their unknown destiny once after they had been trapped to Siberia as slaves and workers to the beet forms. The pitch of the story telling was superb and really makes the reader to involve themselves in to the story. It was impossible to me to get out of the book until I finished reading the last page. It is the perfect outburst of the Lithuanian descendent author, which brings out the hideous things still live in the deepest portion of the Lithuanian’s withered hearts. Meanwhile it is very sad to know this hidden history of the most unfortunate people from these small nations. This book is highly recommended for the ones who love to read the history and historical novels. If one want to know how the human life was worth in the near past history, I suggest to read this book. The human life, relationships, emotions, feelings, rights and destiny everything was considered to be worthless than a hundred gram bread and some times a single cigarette in a frozen fields. No matter where you were in the society or how good were you in financial aspects, everything could be turned upside down in a minute and you would be starving in the streets without money if evil had decided to enter into your life. But how would you know if evil chose you and certainly how would you react when it started to ruin your life.. Do read this wonderful book and refresh your historical knowledge. Final if you liked to read The diary of an young girl by Anne Frank and liked the movie Schindler's list, definitely this book is for you and you would be trapped into the novel.
This is a guest post from ThangaPrakash
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