Between Shades of Gray

In 1941, Lina is a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl much like any other. She sketches, paints, and develops crushes on males. Up until the night when Soviet officers storm into her house and uproot her family from their cozy existence. Lina, her mother, and her younger brother are forced to go north in a cramped and filthy train car after being separated from their father. They gradually pass the Arctic Circle and arrive in a labor camp located in the northernmost tip of Siberia. Here, they are made to battle for their lives in the most brutal circumstances while digging for beets under instructions from Stalin.

Lina takes tremendous comfort in her art, painstakingly and dangerously recording events via drawings in the hopes that these messages may find their way to her father's jail camp and inform him of their continued existence. Lina endures the ordeal, which lasts for years and covers 6,500 kilometers, thanks to her extraordinary fortitude, love, and optimism. A book that will make you gasp and fall in love is Between Shades of Gray.