“Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother's was worth a pocket watch.”

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

Lina is just like any other fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl in 1941. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. Until one night when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded and dirty train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother slowly make their way north, crossing the Arctic Circle, to a work camp in the coldest reaches of Siberia. Here they are forced, under Stalin's orders, to dig for beets and fight for their lives under the cruelest of conditions.

I have read plenty of books set during WWII but few have been as raw and emotional as this one. It is a look at the horrors families faced in Stalin's Russia and it tells about them with unabashed clarity and openness.

Some books tell stories in a gritty fashion, where all is black and dark and grim. This one, though raw, somehow still kept an element of light to it in the telling. It wasn't light hearted by any means, and there were parts which felt hopeless, but it showed the human will to live in impossible times. It is a book about evil times, and the courage which was brought out in those times. 

This book is a must read for anyone who wishes to see the persistence of the human spirit when all is done to crush it.