“BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY” BY RUTA SEPETYS: LIGHT IN THE DARKEST MOMENTS

RATING GUIDE:

 

6 – Life-Affirming and Life-Changing!

5 – A keeper!   

4 – Very good

3 –  Passable

2 –  I’d rather read a telephone book

1 – An absolute bomb.  Read at your own risk!

0 – Nothing will compensate for what I lost reading this book 

 

To think I once thought that “The Diary of Anne Frank” was a hard book to read … After reading Ruta Sepetys’ historical fiction novel, “Between Shades of Gray,” reading “The Diary of Anne Frank” is a walk in the park.  Reading this book is … unspeakable torture.  But it is the kind of torture that I believe everyone must be exposed to if we are to become better people.

At first, I thought this was another book about the Jews’ horrific experience in the hands of Nazis.  Then, I realized I was reading historical fiction about Lithuanians who suffered just as much as the Jews, only this time in was in the hands of the Stalin government.  I was surprised and dismayed to learn that there had been others who experienced the same kind of hell that the Jewish people went through.

“Between Shades of Gray” is the story of a group of Lithuanians in the 1940’s who are suddenly forced to leave their homes and travel by truck to a concentration camp in Siberia.  The story is told from the point of view of a teenaged girl named Lina, who uses her skills at drawing to document her experience and that of her fellow Lithuanians in the hands of their captives. 

This book is not for the weak of heart, for the brutality described in this book simply defies description.  It’s difficult to accept that mankind can inflict such cruelty against their fellowmen; and yet, if we know our history, we know that this kind of cruelty has happened in the past, it is happening now, and will happen again.

Sepetys’ characters gradually get stripped of everything that makes them “human”.  Their possessions are taken away from them, their loved ones, their health, their ability to choose, their freedom … towards the end of the book, all of them have been reduced to nothing.  And yet .. it is when Lina and her companions have been reduced to shadows of themselves that we get a glimpse of the human spirit in its clearest, purest form.  We realize that nothing can destroy love, or friendship, or dignity, or hope … if the human spirit is strong.  That in the end, even if we lose everything that we hold dear, everything that supposedly defines us, at the core, we are still the same inside our hearts and minds.  The human spirit will always triumph over evil.

“Between Shades of Gray” presents humanity at its worst and also at its best.  It is also a reminder for us living in today’s times to never let such atrocities exist again.

RATING:  6