"My husband, Andrius, says that evil will rule until good men or women choose to act. I believe him. This testimony was written to create an absolute record, to speak in a world where our voices have been extinguished."
Previously Published As: Between Shades of Gray
Author: Ruta Sepetys
Published by: Penguin Books
Published on: 18 December 2018
Format: Paperback Movie Tie-In, 384 pages (Gifted by Kat)
Trigger warnings: Death, Violence
Rating: 4.5 ✨
This is my first ever Ruta Sepetys book, and I can officially say that I am now a fan of Sepetys. May even be one of my favorite authors of all time nowww.... okay, yes, she's now one of my favorite authors and am planning to read more of her works in the future, just not right now. I can't just dive into her book one after another or else I'll be subjecting myself to never-ending hole of sadness, so hinga muna gurl.
As a fan of historical fiction, I have a different expectation on her writing style. I thought that it would be heavy and filled with long emotional chapters, but what I found was an easy to read, straight to the point but laden with heavy and gruesome aspects of war kind of historical fiction, and has short emotional chapters all through out the book. The novel was written through the eyes of a 15 year old Lina who was uprooted from her home by the NKVD , along with her mother and brother, brandishing them and many other Lithuanians as fascists and enemies of the State. The book perfectly captured the stark contrast and the sudden shift in Lina's life as Sepetys wrote flashbacks of Lina's life in between chapters while recounting the story of how they were loaded into train for 5 or 6 weeks and deposited into labor camp in Siberia and then in the Arctic Circle.
While this book mentioned in passing Hitler during that time of the second world war, in this piece of time in history, Hitler may be the hero the Lithuanians are waiting for to save them -- the same man who committed the atrocities that bore the horror stories most of us know today. These stories that are waiting to be heard just shows us that there were so many layers of history that are unheard of and are worth being educated about. This book, and many other historical fiction out there that I've recently read and planning to read in the future, serves as testimonials that are silenced for a long time before they were heard by us. So pick up your next historical read because I, too, will.
I might have forgotten to mention, but I have always been curious about Ruta Sepetys' books and what amazed me even further is knowing her ties to this story, which made it especially important for her to tell the story of Lithuania and other Baltic States, Estonia and Latvia. Ruta Sepetys is the daughter of a refugee who was able to escape Lithuana when he was young. Needless to say, we all knew accounts of Holocausts but fewer were known about Stalin's regime, so Sepetys, even with the simple and straight-forward writing of Ashes in the Snow, was able to tell the story across all oceans and continents.
Now, I wanna talk about the movie adaptation of the book, which, in my opinion, lacked some emotional pull, as opposed to the novel. But even with that, I was still moved to tears by the ending of the movie and it is a good visualization of what was recounted in the novel, especially the situation inside the train cars, the labor camps and the condition in the Arctic Circle.
This book is a testament to what the Baltic countries silently endured during Stalin's regime. It may not be the loudest part of history that most of us have heard of but I hope this book finds its way to more readers and remind that it happened, they exist, and they are now free.
This is a story of hope and of families who lived and loved amidst the horror of a ruthless ruler.
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