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From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)

Fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and her younger brother are dragged from their home and packed into a train car in the opening pages of this harrowing novel that begins in Lithuania on June 14, 1941. After a harsh six-week journey with other political prisoners, they arrive in Siberia, where they spend the next several months working on a beet and potato farm before being moved to a prison camp in the Arctic Circle. Author Ruta Sepetys examines Joseph Stalin’s barbaric campaign against the Baltic peoples through the experiences of a teen and her family in a novel that makes history immediate, intimate, and powerful. The struggle for survival as they face starvation, abuse, and illness contrast with Lina’s memories of her life at home, where she dreamed of being an artist and was surrounded by the conversations of her parents and other intellectuals. Desperate for word of her father, who she knows was on another train of prisoners, and in a constant state of fear—for her mother, her brother, herself—Lina is sustained by anger, and by art, creating drawings on anything she can find. The riveting pace and dramatic tension of Sepetys’s narrative is matched by an indelible sense of place and wonderfully drawn secondary characters, each of who reveals another dimension of the tragedy that unfolded across those mid-twentieth-century years in moments that are sometimes cruel, sometimes courageous, and often, simply, so very human. (Age 14 and older)

CCBC Choices 2012 © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 2012. Used with permission.

From School Library Journal

November 1, 2021

Gr 9 Up-To mark the 10th anniversary of Sepetys's moving work about a teenager imprisoned in a Siberian work camp, Donkin and Kopka have adapted it into graphic novel format. In June 1941, Lina and her family in Lithuania are taken from their home by Soviet officers. Lina, 15, is furious and terrified. Her mother bribes the guards into letting Lina's younger brother stay with her and Lina; Lina's father's fate is unknown. Lina meets a young man named Andrius on the train, and their friendship eventually blossoms into tentative romance. The text is told largely from Lina's perspective, with dialogue from her family and fellow refugees. Once their packed train car arrives at the camp, Lina and her mother work in the beet fields and struggle to stay alive; Lina attempts to get word to her father that they're in Siberia. Lina finds solace in her artwork, and this is where the graphic novel format shines. The story does not shy from the more horrific details, although violence and death are often depicted off-page. The book is based on real-life accounts of Lithuanian refugees, and an author's note illuminates Sepetys's research. The watercolors are rendered mostly in somber grays and browns, although occasional splashes of color are used to great effect. Teens familiar with the story will appreciate its new form, and it will also bring in plenty of new readers. VERDICT Offering a side of World War II not often depicted in media, this is a solid addition for teen graphic novel collections.-Gretchen Hardin, Bee Cave P.L., TX

Copyright 2021 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

From Kirkus

Starred review from September 15, 2021
A graphic novel treatment of Sepetys' acclaimed Between Shades of Gray (2011) illuminates the story of a teenage Lithuanian girl's imprisonment in a Siberian labor camp. In 1941, 15-year-old Lina is deported, along with her mother and young brother, by the Soviet forces occupying her home country of Lithuania. They endure a grueling six-week train journey, unaware of their destination or the whereabouts of Lina's father, who disappeared prior to their arrest. Once they reach Siberia, they are sold into a sentence of 25 years of hard labor and forced to sign a document saying that they committed crimes against the Soviet Union. The harsh struggles that Lina and her fellow countrymen face as Soviet prisoners are poignantly depicted in the graphic novel format, which utilizes spare, poetic language to throw into stark relief the images depicting the physical and emotional abuses they are forced to endure. Throughout these hardships, Lina holds onto hope that she and her family will survive to be reunited with her father; in the meantime, she documents her heartbreaking experiences through her drawing. Like Lina's art, the stirring, watercolorlike illustrations serve as an evocative medium for relaying both the horrors of her experience and the sublime resilience of the human spirit. A stunningly rendered graphic adaptation that will introduce new readers to this important chapter in history. (author's note) (Graphic historical fiction. 12-18)

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

From Horn Book

May 1, 2011
In 1939, the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic nations, which then disappeared from maps, not to reappear until 1990. Teachers, librarians, musicians, artists, writers, business owners, doctors, lawyers, and servicemen were considered anti-Soviet and sent into exile. Esther Hautzig told this story in her seminal 1968 memoir The Endless Steppe; Sepetys's even starker novel is more extreme in its depiction of deprivation and suffering. When in June 1941 the Soviet secret police show up at fifteen-year-old Lina Vilkas's Lithuania home and throw Lina, her younger brother, and their mother onto a train, a decade-long nightmare begins. "Like matchsticks in a small box," forty-six people were crammed into their car, "a cage on wheels, maybe a rolling coffin" bound for the vast nothingness of Siberia. So begins a human drama calling forth the best and worst of human behaviors -- courage, anger, fear, confusion, little kindnesses, and egregious selfishness. The bald man with the broken leg whines and complains, while the librarian organizes the children and tells stories, and all along the way Lina's mother keeps her family together. Sepetys creates complicated characters: there's more to the bald man than whining and complaining, and the young NKVD guard Nikolai proves not to be the monster Lina considers him. Two excellent maps and an informative author's note round out a haunting chronicle, demonstrating that even in the heart of darkness "love is the most powerful army." dean Schneider

(Copyright 2011 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

From School Library Journal

Starred review from March 1, 2011

Gr 8 Up-This novel is based on extensive research and inspired by the author's family background. Told by 15-year-old Lina, a Lithuanian teen with penetrating insight and vast artistic ability, it is a gruesome tale of the deportation of Lithuanians to Siberia starting in 1939. During her 12 years there, Lina, a strong, determined character, chronicles her experiences through writings and drawings. She willingly takes chances to communicate with her imprisoned father and to improve her family's existence in inhuman conditions. Desperation, fear, and the survival instinct motivate many of the characters to make difficult compromises. Andrius, who becomes Lina's love interest, watches as his mother prostitutes herself with the officers in order to gain food for her son and others. To ward off starvation, many sign untrue confessions of guilt as traitors, thereby accepting 25-year sentences. Those who refuse, like Lina, her younger brother, and their mother, live on meager bread rations given only for the physical work they are able to perform. This is a grim tale of suffering and death, but one that needs telling. Mention is made of some Lithuanians' collaboration with the Nazis, but for the most part the deportees were simply caught in a political web. Unrelenting sadness permeates this novel, but there are uplifting moments when the resilience of the human spirit and the capacity for compassion take over. This is a gripping story that gives young people a window into a shameful, but likely unfamiliar history.-Renee Steinberg, formerly at Fieldstone Middle School, Montvale, NJ

Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

From Booklist

Starred review from February 1, 2011
Grades 7-12 *Starred Review* Sepetys first novel offers a harrowing and horrifying account of the forcible relocation of countless Lithuanians in the wake of the Russian invasion of their country in 1939. In the case of 16-year-old Lina, her mother, and her younger brother, this means deportation to a forced-labor camp in Siberia, where conditions are all too painfully similar to those of Nazi concentration camps. Linas great hope is that somehow her father, who has already been arrested by the Soviet secret police, might find and rescue them. A gifted artist, she begins secretly creating pictures that canshe hopesbe surreptitiously sent to him in his own prison camp. Whether or not this will be possible, it is her art that will be her salvation, helping her to retain her identity, her dignity, and her increasingly tenuous hold on hope for the future. Many others are not so fortunate. Sepetys, the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee, estimates that the Baltic States lost more than one-third of their populations during the Russian genocide. Though many continue to deny this happened, Sepetys beautifully written and deeply felt novel proves the reality is otherwise. Hers is an important book that deserves the widest possible readership.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

From Kirkus

Starred review from January 15, 2011

This bitterly sad, fluidly written historical novel tackles a topic woefully underdiscussed in English-language children's fiction: Joseph Stalin's reign of terror. On June 14th, 1941, Soviet officers arrest 15-year-old Lina, her younger brother and her mother and deport them from Lithuania to Siberia. Their crammed-full boxcar is labeled, ludicrously, "Thieves and Prostitutes." They work at a frigid gulag for eight months—hungry, filthy and brutalized by Soviet officers—before being taken to the Siberian Arctic and left without shelter. Lina doesn't know the breadth of Stalin's mass deportations of Baltic citizens, but she hears scraps of discussion about politics and World War II. Cold, starvation, exhaustion and disease (scurvy, dysentery, typhus) claim countless victims. Lina sketches urgently, passing her drawings along to other deportees, hoping they'll reach Papa in a Soviet prison. Brief flashbacks, seamlessly interwoven, illuminate Lina's sweet old life in Kaunas like flashes of light, eventually helping to reveal why the repressive, deadly regime targeted this family. Sepetys' flowing prose gently carries readers through the crushing tragedy of this tale that needs telling. (maps, timeline, author's note) (Historical fiction. 12 & up, adult)

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

From Publisher's Weekly

Starred review from January 3, 2011
Through the pained yet resilient narration of 15-year-old Lina, a gifted artist, this taut first novel tells the story of Lithuanians deported and sent to Siberian work camps by Stalin during WWII. From the start, Sepetys makes extensive use of foreshadowing to foster a palpable sense of danger, as soldiers wrench Lina's family from their home. The narrative skillfully conveys the deprivation and brutality of conditions, especially the cramped train ride, unrelenting hunger, fears about family members' safety, impossible choices, punishing weather, and constant threats facing Lina, her mother, and her younger brother. Flashbacks, triggered like blasts of memory by words and events, reveal Lina's life before and lay groundwork for the coming removal. Lina's romance with fellow captive Andrius builds slowly and believably, balancing some of the horror. A harrowing page-turner, made all the more so for its basis in historical fact, the novel illuminates the persecution suffered by Stalin's victims (20 million were killed), while presenting memorable characters who retain their will to survive even after more than a decade in exile. Ages 12â€"up.

From AudioFile Magazine

Emily Klein quickly convinces listeners of the harsh reality and perceptive viewpoint of Lina, an artistic 15-year-old Lithuanian. Klein's evocative inflections mirror Lina's family's confusion and fear as they're woken by Stalin's soldiers and loaded onto cattle cars labeled "Thieves and Prostitutes," which are headed to a labor camp in Siberia. Klein doesn't hold back from the story's intensity--portraying the brutality, filth, bitter cold, and sometimes brief tenderness that buoys Lina, giving her the resilience to record all she sees with her art, hoping that one day it tells the story she can't. Relief comes as well in the well-drawn, well-acted vignettes of Lina's formerly happy life in Lithuania. Klein also draws credible portraits of Lina's mother, brother, and fellow prisoners. An author's note strengthens this little-known part of history. S.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine