“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.” – 3.5/5 stars!

Attention! This book contains: drawings, beets, scurvy, genocide starvation, Baltic countries, Stalin, deportation, and labor camps.

Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they’ve known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother slowly make their way north, crossing the Arctic Circle, to a work camp in the coldest reaches of Siberia. Here they are forced, under Stalin’s orders, to dig for beets and fight for their lives under the cruelest of conditions.

Lina finds solace in her art, meticulously—and at great risk—documenting events by drawing, hoping these messages will make their way to her father’s prison camp to let him know they are still alive. It is a long and harrowing journey, spanning years and covering 6,500 miles, but it is through incredible strength, love, and hope that Lina ultimately survives. Between Shades of Gray is a novel that will steal your breath and capture your heart.

This book has been on the back of my mind for years! I followed a YouTuber a few years ago named Joana Ceddia – you may have heard of her -, and she mentioned this book in a video, saying this was her favorite book of all time. Since then this book has been on my TBR. I finally picked it up this month, and even though I didn’t love it as much as Joana did, I still liked it!

It’s a work of fiction based on what happened to the Baltic states after the Soviet Union annexed and occupied their countries. The people from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were deported and imprisoned, and many of them ended up in Siberia doing forced labor. This story in particular follows a teenage girl named Lina who was deported from Lithuania, along with her mother and brother. She was an artist, but her dreams were put on hold the moment the soviet soldiers broke into her home and forced them to leave with them. It’s a heartbreaking sad story, as you can imagine!

I believe the target audience for this book is young adults, but I have to warn you there is some violence in this book, so keep that in mind when you decide to read this. Still, for a YA historical book, this was a good book. 

And yet, I kept thinking about why this didn’t grab my attention like I thought it would. After some thought, I think I finally found out the reason why! The author did a great job creating a very atmospheric read, but I feel like the tragic events were toned down (a lot) because at the end of the day… it’s still a YA book. I just had this constant feeling that things were way worse than what the author was describing. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that – I just prefer a more realistic, true approach to historical themes. Again, this is a YA book and I’m not exactly in the targeted age, so that’s on me.

I wasn’t mind-blown by this book, but it was still an okay story for me. I personally didn’t know a lot about this situation, so it was nice to learn about the history behind the fiction. I ended up doing some research on the topic after reading this book – and that’s exactly what I consider a positive impact from a book!

It’s an informative book for youngsters, so I would still recommend this if you are in the age range and want to learn a little more about the topic through a work of fiction.