Between Shades of GrayMy rating: ★★★★
ISBN: 9780399254123
Publisher: Philomel
Date of publication: March 22, 2011
Age: Grades 7 and up
Genre: Historical Fiction
Themes: WWII, Soviet Russia, resistance, labor camp
Awards: Golden Kite Award for Fiction, William C. Morris YA Debut Award Nominee (2012), ALA Teens' Top Ten Nominee (2012), Indies Choice Book Award for Young Adult (2012), Carnegie Medal in Literature Nominee, YALSA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults (2014), Kirkus Reviews Best Teen Books of the Year (2011), YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults (Top Ten) (2012), Cybils Awards Nominee for Young Adult Fiction (2011)
It’s 1941 and Lina, along with her mother and brother, have just been pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet soldiers and sent to a labor camp in Siberia. Her father’s work with the resistance has been discovered and he’s been taken away to die in a prison camp. Lina is determined to stay alive and honor her and her father’s story through art and word.
This was a rather fantastically tragic novel that reveals a partially true story about those countrymen who were targeted by Soviet Russia. Germany, after all, was not the only dictatorship to sentence their people to death camps. Lina’s story flips from present troubles at the camp, to her previous comfortable life as she makes the connections between her father’s resistance work and her current sentence. I enjoyed the author’s writing and the personal historical note at the end that just makes the whole situation so real.
Find it at your library or on Amazon
No comments:
Post a Comment