Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

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

344 Pages. (March 2011)

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Title Read-alikes: Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein; The Boy on the Bridge by Natlie Standiford; Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian; Someday We Will Fly by Rachel DeWoskin; Like Water on Stone by Dana Walrath; Torn Thread by Anne Isaacs; Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz; Breaking Stalin's Nose by Eugene Yelchin; The Winter Horses by Philip Kerr; The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig; Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly; Memories of My Future by Ammar Habib; and A Night Divided by Jennifer A Nielsen.