Between Shades of Gray

This first thing I have to say about this book is that it is NOT Fifty Shades of Gray. This is a book about the gulags not sex.

Between Shades Of Gray by Ruta Sepetys is about a 15-year-old Lithuanian girl who is taken to a Siberian labor camp under Stalin's rule. We follow Lina from the day she is taken by the NKVD (a secret soviet police) all throughout the time she spends at the camps (called gulags) to when she is set free again.
Because Lina and I are very close in age I find it easy to connect with her. This helps me to empathize because I have never been in a situation even remotely close to what she went through.
Lina is an artist and in the book she vows to draw everything that happens to her and bury it in a jar so that one day someone will know her story.
One of the most captivating aspects in this book is it's imagery. Lina tells the story using what she sees and how she translates that into her own mind. The result is some powerful images and a lot of confusion that Lina and the reader work out together.
If anyone is learning about the gulags in school or are just interested in that part of history I would definitely recommend this book. It is fiction, but the author used survivors stories to shape one of her own.

Comments

Junkie Metaphors and Books About Our Inner Crazy

So, recently I was doing a spot of (mandatory) community service for my gym teacher when I experienced a rare instance of karmic payoff. Me and a bunch of other temporary bond-slaves were unloading this huge file cabinet onto the gym floor, sorting everything from Dance Revolution DVDs to pamphlets on Your First Visit to the Ob-Gyn! into neat piles, when I uncovered quite by chance a crumbling copy of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. Elated, I carried it around for the remainder of the period until my teacher took pity on me and offered to let me borrow it. It's falling apart before my very eyes I swear... I fell in love with this book the moment I heard its title quite a while ago - Naked Lunch ? What the hell kind of weird awesome twisted name is that? I am only now realizing how twisted it really is. The book is a compilation of notes that Burroughs took while under the sick influence of heroin. ...

Lessons to be Learned From the Princess Sara Crewe

Have any of you read A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett? It was the book that made me love books. (Does every book-lover have one of those? Do you?) I first read it when I was very little and have spent the last two days rereading it, as I tend to do every few years. But the thing that struck me about the story this time around is that the story's preteen heroine, Sara Crewe, seems to have life completely figured out. Even when she loses both her father and her fortune and is working as a hated scullery maid at her London boarding school to pay off her debts, she never sacrifices her virtues of benevolence, hope, and grace. Her secret is that she considers herself a princess in spirit, even when she is no longer as wealthy and privileged as one. Sadly, I have not yet gotten my life philosophies together and lack Sara's ability to gracefull...

My Irrelevant Opinion on Teen Dystopias

I read books indiscriminately. I am just as happy reading Beowulf, a crusty old Scandinavian epic poem, as I am reading The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. So I'm not a snob who only reads first-edition classics bound in leather or anything like that. But I do have one requirement when it comes to the books I read and recommend, and that is that they be good . And I do see a problem emerging in one of YA's most popular new genres, the teen dystopian novel, and that is that many of these books are not good. The dystopia craze started, I believe, with the success of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (a book that I very much adore) . It's hard to make it as a writer, so when people saw how well her parable of futuristic teen angst and bloodshed did, they understandably thought Aha! Here is the formula for success!! And ten seconds later, the front display tables of every Barnes a...

the book bum

Search This Blog