Between Shades of Gray discussion

The book that I chose to read for Miller’s appendix E was “Between Shades of Gray” by Ruta Sepetys. In all honesty, I chose this book because I didn’t have the textbook yet and heard about this book for a friend. This book is about a teenage girl, Lina and her family that are captured by the Soviets under Stalin and forced to work and live in horrible conditions. I liked this book because it reminded me of books I used to read in elementary school about World War II and I thought it would be interesting to hear about it from the Soviet perspective instead of Nazi Germany. This book was similar to last weeks in the sense that it was super dark yet hard to put down. I think the narrative story telling of Lina was very diverse. I think most stories of this time period are purely on the specifics of the troubles of daily life, which she covered, but she also talks about her interests and thoughts about being a teenage girl more specifically her art interests and dating life. I like the short chapters of the book and it seemed to make it feel like I was reading more than I was. It made the book go by much quicker. Overall, I think that even though this book was fiction, it gave me it felt real and was a great book. It brought me back to my 5th grade classroom when we used to read stories like this and I really enjoyed it.