One of the Best Historical Fiction Novels I've Ever Read!

You Will Not Regret Reading This One

Between Shades of Gray

Ruta Sepetys

Goodreads Review: 

It's 1941 and fifteen-year-old artist Lina Vilkas is on Stalin's extermination list. Deported to a prison camp in Siberia, Lina fights for her life, fearless, risking everything to save her family. It's a long and harrowing journey and it is only their incredible strength, love, and hope that pull Lina and her family through each day. But will love be enough to keep them alive?

My Feelings:

Where to begin with this masterpiece?  

This historical fiction based on a tremendous disaster of imprisoning people in Europe and forcing them into slavery to work the lands of Russia, caused by Joseph Stalin was written delicately and expertly.  

Not a moment went by while reading, that I felt anything other than captivated.  I was there with Lina. 17 year old Lithuanian who was forced onto a train car with her family without even a hint of what was happening or where she was being taken.  Sepetys put me in the train cars in that moment.  The descriptive words used really drew me in and held on tight.  I could smell the smells.  I could hear the crying.

  Tears fell down my cheeks as I read through the harsh conditions these innocent people were forced to bare.  Sepetys brilliantly highlights some of the deepest secrets of Stalin’s deadly war path.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could build friendships or even relationships during such a trying time, but that’s precisely what had happened.  Her characters come to life on the pages and and place you in that time, at those camps, starving with them.  Wishing you could reach your hand through the book and into the past and give them extra water, food and clothes.  All the while, reading that some of these victims still had kept forgiveness in their hearts for their captors and held onto this false hope of ever being released.

What’s most important to me, while reading a historical fiction, is that these fictional characters are based off of real people in real situations that had no outs, no escapes.  If anyone is looking to be completely and fully enveloped by a book, Between Shades of Gray is that book for you.