Between Shades of Gray 

By Ruta Sepetys 

Genre: Young Adult Historical Fiction 

Personal Rating: 10/10

What a better book to start off a book blog with than Between Shades of Gray? I read this book as assigned reading for my Young Adult Literature class this last semester, but once I finished I was kicking myself for not reading it earlier. This book follows the story of Lina--a Lithuanian girl in 1941. Her life is like that of any other fifteen-year-old girl, until the night her entire family is taken from their home by Soviet officers. Lina, her mother, and younger brother are separated from their father, forced into a crowded train car, labeled as criminals, and transported north to a work camp. They live in fear and freezing cold, trying to survive their heavy work loads on meager food rations.

What I found so intriguing about his book is the new and unique perspective it gives. It's a book about concentration camps, but an entirely different kind of concentration camp. We hear a lot about what it was like being as Jew during Hitler's reign, because Hitler liked to publicized his gruesome deeds. Stalin, on the other hand, liked to keep his mass killings under wrap, so we don't hear as much about the things he did to his own people. This part of history was kept a secret for so long, and one of the most heartbreaking parts of this book is that while these people are being worked and starved to death they hold on the the hope that the Americans will save them. When, in reality, we had no idea this was happening to them. 

Lina is an outstanding character. She keeps herself sane through all this by drawing the things that happen to her and her family--an act that could have gotten her killed. This novel is full of incredibly diverse characters that shows how people survived--or tied to survive--in different ways. This book is an incredible story about survival and the worth of human life. A must read!