In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and brother are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia, where her father is sentenced to death in a prison camp while she fights for her life, vowing to honor her family and the thousands like hers by burying her story in a jar on Lithuanian soil. The story is more powerful since you know it is based on the author's own family.

On June 19t,1941, the Soviet Secret police pounded on the door of fifteen year old Lina Vilkas, her mother and her little brother. Their father had disappeared prior to that. It was in the middle of the night and they had twenty minutes to pack what they could carry. They were herded to trucks and later dirty cattle cars for a long and cold, hungry trip to Siberia. After a few days, the people in her car discovered a plate sized hole in the corner of the car and they began using that as their bathroom. Lina loved to draw, using her fingernails, she scratched out pictures on the wall of the cattle car. People got sick, babies died and the police, pitched the babies out the car into the mud. It was a harrowing journey to Siberia.

It was a difficult book to read based on the stories of the survivors. A few times, I could only read three pages a day because their lives were so tragic and scary. The original book is much longer and I don't know if I could get through it.

The deportees were housed in tiny dirty log cabins that they scrubbed to get clean. It was in collective and a beet farm. One incident that I cannot get out of my mind is when Lina and her family were working on the beet field and a man was caught by the police, eating a beet. A group of police surrounded him and made everyone come and watch as a man pulled out all of the man’s teeth with pliers. Many died but a few survived to tell their stories. ( )

Haunting. The drawings pulled you in, they depicted the desolate, grey lives the Lithuanian prisoners of war lived. I did not realize that, similar to the Jews, those from Lithuania, Estonia and other countries endured the same horrors as those who we victims of HItler and the Holocaust. ( )

Ruta Sepetys' father was spirited out of Lithuania just ahead of the Soviet occupation in 1941. Members of her extended family were deported and imprisoned along with thousands of other Balts. Sent to Siberia to serve sentences of up to 25 years hard labor, they were labeled thieves and prostitutes. Even after they returned to Lithuania, they lived in fear of being persecuted or even killed if they spoke of their experiences. Sepetys wrote the novel Between Shades of Gray after interviewing survivors, historians, and government officials, as well as her own surviving family members. This book is a graphic novel adaptation of her novel, which is particularly apt as the protagonist is an artist.

Fifteen-year-old Lina Vilkas is taken by the NKVD one night in June 1941 along with her mother and younger brother. Her father had disappeared prior to their arrest and was assumed to have been imprisoned for an anti-Soviet attitude. They are packed into cattle cars with hundreds of other Lithuanian doctors, lawyers, teachers, librarians, and anyone else on the "lists" as suspected anti-Soviets, and their families. Lina and her family are first imprisoned on a kolkhoz in Siberia, where living conditions are horrific. Then they are sent north of the arctic circle in the first batch of Lithuanians and Finns sent to create the Trofimovsk gulag. Throughout everything, Lina continues drawing and documenting her experiences. ( )

teen graphic historical fiction, based on the novel (made into a movie), based on accounts from actual survivors (characters are mostly fictional but the events and conditions are real). A family gets separated, shipped to labor camps after Stalin invades Lithuania during WWII.

I suspect the original novel is better but the graphic version is not bad. ( )