5 July 2010 BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY by Ruta Sepetys, Philomel, March 2011, 312p., ISBN: 978-0-399-25412-3

"When and where had the Soviets dragged my father away?  Was it on his way to work?  Or maybe at the newspaper stand during his lunch hour?  I looked at the masses of people on the train platform.  There were elderly people.  Lithuania cherished its elders, and here they were, being herded like animals."'Davai!'  An NKVD officer grabbed Jonas by the shoulders and began to drag him away."'NO!' screamed Mother."They were taking Jonas.  My beautiful, sweet brother who shooed bugs out of the house instead of stepping on them, who gave his little ruler to splint a crotchety old man's leg.  "'Mama!  Lina!' he cried, flailing his arms."'Stop!' I screamed, tearing after them.  Mother grabbed the officer and began speaking in Russian -- pure, fluent Russian.  He stopped and listened.  She lowered her voice and spoke calmly.  I couldn't understand a word.  The officer jerked Jonas toward him.  I grabbed his other arm.  His body began to vibrate as sobs wracked his shoulders.  A big wet spot appeared on the front of his trousers.  He hung his head and cried.

"Mother pulled a bundle of rubles from her pocket and exposed it slightly to the officer.  He reached for it and then said something to Mother, motioning with his head.  Her hand flew up and ripped the amber pendant right from her neck and pressed it into the NKVD's hand.  He didn't seem to be satisfied.  Mother continued to speak in Russian and pulled a pocket watch from her coat.  I knew that watch.  It was her father's and had his name engraved in the soft gold on the back.  The officer snatched the watch, let go of Jonas, and started yelling at the people next to us.

"Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth?  That morning, my brother's was worth a pocket watch."

I know that some of you are going to be annoyed by my writing about a book that won't be out until 2011.  I certainly brought home enough 2010 titles from ALA to keep me busy until next year.  But I was personally handed this one and asked to check it out, and once I read a few pages (while standing on line to get a book autographed), I was compelled to keep reading for days in order to find out what would finally become of young Lina Vilkas and her family. 

One thing that is so fascinating and horrifying about BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY is that the stories of what befell all of these victims of Josef Stalin's purge of the Baltics were not revealed until the 1990s when -- a half century after this story takes place -- Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia regained their national identities and independence upon the fall of the Soviet Union.  Until then, never-ending fear of KGB reprisal muted any significant revelation of the unspeakable horrors that had befallen an unfathomable number of innocent victims.

One thing that is so disconcerting about BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY is the sad realization that there always seem to be people like Stalin and there always seem to be people willing to follow these awful leaders.  So many of us put our hearts and souls into trying to stop bullying and trying to counteract prejudice and ignorance amongst young people and it is just so hard to read a book like this that, page after page after page, is so heart achingly real and, unfortunately, is based on the horrible things that people really did to one another. 

Sometimes it just sucks to be human.

So it felt as I sat on the grass of the high school football field amongst my neighbors, awaiting darkness and the fireworks, wracked with audible sobs of relief, my eyes dripping when  -- near the end of the story, when all seems lost -- something finally, finally goes right for Lina Vilkas, her little brother Jonah, and their similarly half-dead fellow captives. 

Fifteen year-old Lina is an extraordinary young artist.  She and Jonah are the offspring of a Lithuanian university provost who is willing to help and advise his neighbors.  This earns him a sudden trip to a prison camp on one train full of men and qualifies his wife and two children for a spot in a packed cattle car full of other such lowlifes (like teachers and librarians) that departs Lithuania, stops for a few months in a prison camp, and then proceeds (with those still left alive) to deliver Lina's family and neighbors to the Arctic wastelands where they are made to freeze and starve while their captors party it up and periodically torture them.  Being that this story is based upon the author's own ancestral history and her extensive meetings with now-elderly Lithuanian survivors, the degree to which there is a happy ending here is a realistic one: there are some characters who will, in fact, actually survive to someday tell what happened to them.

And there are unlikely heroes.  As Lina conveys her story through words and through her drawings (that we can see through her vivid descriptions of them) we slowly come to realize, along with Lina, that many of the characters we meet are not black or white.  They are shades of gray and are just trying to be okay. 

I love the fear and skepticism that make Lina so real.  She is one of those Angela Chase-like characters who carefully observes and chronicles and asks why.  It is not often that she speaks up and her instincts are not always correct.  She is a character who now lives in me.

I spend a lot of time reading and writing about books.  BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY is one of those books that reminds me how well spent that time is.

Richie Partington, MLIS
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FTC NOTICE: Richie receives free books from lots of publishers who hope he will Pick their books.  You can figure that any review was written after reading and dog-earring a free copy received.  Richie retains these review copies for his rereading pleasure and for use in his booktalks at schools and libraries.