Author: Ruth Sepetys

Title: Between Shades of Gray

Publisher: Philomel

As a World War II-era novel, the young adult novel Between Shades of Gray occupies a narrow, but vital, sliver of space between Holocast memoirs and American battlefield or home-front tales.

The debut novel by Ruth Sepetys, herself the daughter of a Lithuanian immigrant, Between Shades of Gray spins a hypnotic tale which focuses on the deportation by Stalinist Russia of the natives of a host of countries, including Lithuania in the 1940's.

For half a century, as noted on the novel's dust jacket, many of the Baltic States were effectively taken off the map, one of the lasting reminders of the brutal Stalinist purge which reconfigured much of Eastern Europe. It was only after the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 that nations like Lithuania - each with its own culture and heritage - were able to reemerge.

With this painful past, it would be easy for Sepetys to fall into the temptation to simply recycle historical events. Not so with Gray. Harrowing, heart-breaking, and at times, unflinchingly bleak in its depiction of suffering, this is a story, through and through, not a history lesson. Sepetys manages to carve out a story which puts flesh and blood to historical occurrence. The story isn't flawlessly executed, but its impact is.

From the novel's opening line - "They took me in my nightgown" to the final image of its first chapter - an officer grinding a cigarette under his boot, then the commentary, "We were about to become cigarettes," the story of 15-year old Lina Arvydas is gripping, even when the pace lags or the writing falters. Arvydas and her family - mother and younger brother Jonas - are taken from their homes on June 14, 1941, separated from their father, and herded onto cattle cars along with hundreds of other Lithuanians. Their only crime, incredibly, was being Lithuanian. These criminals were taken first to a Siberian labor camp, then eventually to a remote outpost on the Laptev Sea, high above the Arctic Circle.

All this might be familiar territory to readers of other Holocaust-era literature. But Sepetys does well to imbue her characters with personality, and even manages to create a delicate, winning love story in the midst of the senseless violence, as Lina meets Andrius, a boy she first struggles to understand, but eventually comes to see as a symbol for hope. Their relationship is gentle and free of teen angst clichés, instead becoming something more inspiring: the catalyst for realizations about the necessity of hope in the most catastrophic situations.

This isn't a story free of deaths, but because of Sepetys' gift for character and detail, when one finishes, it almost seems like he's suffered along with these doomed cast-offs. The biting cold of the Siberian winter, the bloody fingernails of forced labor, the hacking coughs of disease: these details linger long after the final page is turned. Sepetys aims for the gut punch of raw emotion over the gloss of an artistic masterpiece, and hits.

For young readers experiencing the story of Lina, this novel may well be as memorable as The Diary of Anne Frank was for a previous generation of readers. If young adult literature has become an industry about finding new ways to tell the same stories for readers who will only pick up a book if it's hot or new, then Between Shades of Gray is a rousing success.

*This review first published 4/5/2011