Helpful Score: 1
Incorporating true accounts and experiences from survivors, this fiction novel follows one girl, fifteen-year-old Lina, and her mother and younger brother through the aftermath of the Non-Agression Pact and Stalin's plans.
It's a frightening story. With the NKVD guard watching, the transported Lithuanians were sentenced to work on a kolkhoz, a working farm, and sentenced for ten years and longer. Farming for beets, digging holes, and only rationed 300 grams of bread per day, Lina and her family struggled to survive. There is no medicine and no warmth during the cold Russian winters at their gulag. Prisoners are starved, humiliated, and die.
Lina's artwork was always startlingly realistic for her age. As several prisoners did based on true accounts that Sepetys gathered during her research, they documented tragedies through writing, drawing, and wood carvings. Throughout Lina's "sentence" in the camps, she tries to draw as much as she can, atrocities forever etched on the scraps of paper she can find.
Fearful for what may happen, though, should they be caught, this evidence was destroyed or buried in the ground and never spoken about. Even after they were released years later, survivors were still afraid of being charged with another crime and returning back to the prisons, so they kept their stories buried.
This is probably one of the best Young Adult books I've ever read. It's an intense and tough subject matter of unspoken history, and the writing is both vividly descriptive and heart-wrenching, but also maintains the authenticity that this is told from a teenager's point of view. Sections that struck me the hardest at times were those that recognized that even in the depths of sadness, there were moments of hope and love.
It's a frightening story. With the NKVD guard watching, the transported Lithuanians were sentenced to work on a kolkhoz, a working farm, and sentenced for ten years and longer. Farming for beets, digging holes, and only rationed 300 grams of bread per day, Lina and her family struggled to survive. There is no medicine and no warmth during the cold Russian winters at their gulag. Prisoners are starved, humiliated, and die.
Lina's artwork was always startlingly realistic for her age. As several prisoners did based on true accounts that Sepetys gathered during her research, they documented tragedies through writing, drawing, and wood carvings. Throughout Lina's "sentence" in the camps, she tries to draw as much as she can, atrocities forever etched on the scraps of paper she can find.
Fearful for what may happen, though, should they be caught, this evidence was destroyed or buried in the ground and never spoken about. Even after they were released years later, survivors were still afraid of being charged with another crime and returning back to the prisons, so they kept their stories buried.
This is probably one of the best Young Adult books I've ever read. It's an intense and tough subject matter of unspoken history, and the writing is both vividly descriptive and heart-wrenching, but also maintains the authenticity that this is told from a teenager's point of view. Sections that struck me the hardest at times were those that recognized that even in the depths of sadness, there were moments of hope and love.
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