Literary Life | Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

After my local library closed temporarily for renovations, my literary life posts have been somewhat lacking. But joy, oh joy, my library is open and alive again! So I wasted no time in nipping in and grabbing a book. I picked up Between Shades of Gray and instantly set down to read it the minute I got home. The story dictates, using first-hand family accounts, the story of Lina and her journey across continents after she is deported from Lithuania. 

The setting is bleak, as one would expect from a war-based novel. Though Hitler is mentioned, it is Stalin's Russia and the Soviet guards who here are the enemy. The harrowing depiction of Lina's journey and the consecutive loss of those she loves is, unsurprisingly, tough to read at times. But glimmers of hope and happiness see Lina and her brother, Jonas, through to the end.

Sepetys begins with incredibly short chapters and I raced through chapters one to eleven in a matter of minutes. In fact, I managed to finish the whole book over the space of a day; partly because the text itself is quite modest, but also because of an eagerness to anticipate what was to follow. From the start it's hard not to root for Lina's mother, Elena, who is everyone's mother at some point or another. The selflessness she demonstrates inspires many a fellow camp mate and she continues to teach and mould her two children into decent human beings despite being faced with desperation and depravity.

Lina, a talented and artistic teenager, manages to make it through her ordeal by committing everything to memory and capturing the atrocities on the page. She draws in dirt when her tools are sparse but nothing is forgotten. The real Lina, who is mentioned in a small epilogue at the close of the novel, hid and buried her writings and drawings to be found in the future. We can assume from the creation and publication of Sepetys's novel that Lina's wish was granted. There is also real truth in the blossoming love story Sepetys captures between Lina and Andrius. The book ends on an uncertain note, with Lina still wishing for Andrius to find and save her. Thanks to the epilogue, we know their reunion was a happy one, a wait most worthwhile. 
Although the section where Lina reads through the book Andrius gives her as a birthday present remains a personal favourite, it is Elena's description of young men that tickled me the most. Sensing some sort of feelings beginning to brew, Elena explains how men are often more 'practical than pretty' but that Andrius happens to be both. But she also highlights male awkwardness, in a speech that I loved, for the picture the words painted were so true to life.

"Sometimes there is such beauty in awkwardness. There's love and emotion trying to express itself, but at the time, it just ends up being awkward."

Jade x
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