Review: Between Shades of Gray - Ruta Sepetys

I saw this book making its way around Booktube and there was nothing but rave reviews, and the story line sounded really interesting, so I decided to pick it up. 

The story follows a young girl from Lithuania. She and her family are arrested and deported by the Soviets along with a number of other people from all over the country in 1941. We follow their journey to the forced labour camps and their struggle to survive the cruelty of the Soviets. 

I must say I have mixed feelings about this book. The first part very much reminded me about every story I’ve ever read about the deportation of Jews to the concentration camps during World War II, and while that story is extremely important to tell, I started to wonder if this book was going to bring anything new to the table. In the end I think it did. The story is so similar to that of the Jewish deportations, that it’s hard to remember that it’s actually something different. If you changed  the NKVD (Soviet police) for Nazi’s you wouldn’t know the difference. And while that at first had me thinking that this was the same story over again, in the end I began to think that maybe that was the point. Here we have a genocide, committed at the same time as the Holocaust, but while practically everyone knows the story of the Nazi’s and the Holocaust today, almost no one realizes what went on in the Baltic countries during the same period under the reign of Stalin. Partly because the Baltic countries were occupied until the 1990s (only 30 years ago!!) and during this time it was illegal to speak of the genocide, the deportations and the forced labour camps. So the story is only now beginning to make its way out of the shadows of history. 

As I said above, I have mixed feelings about this book. I think it is an important story to tell, but as a narrative I didn’t really connect with it. Perhaps it’s just because Lina is 15 years old, and has led a privileged life up until the deportations. Everything is black and white for her, and she doesn’t understand that there are shades of gray, and that people will compromise in order to survive. She learns this along the way, but I thought she was too stubborn to realize what was going on for way too long. Maybe she was just too young for me. She had a believable voice, but I found I didn’t really have patience with her. But maybe that is just me, growing too old to understand the youngsters!

In the end I gave this 3 stars out of 5 on Goodreads, and I would definitely recommend this to anyone, but maybe more so to a younger teen audience.