- Labor camps, Juvenile fiction, Fiction, Survival
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. Lina finds solace in her art, meticulously–and at great risk–documenting events by drawing, hoping these messages will make their way to her father’s prison camp to let him know they are still alive. It is a long and harrowing journey, spanning years and covering 6,500 miles, but it is through incredible strength, love, and hope that Lina ultimately survives.
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Character
Earnest, grave, classical in form and resolved.
- earnestironic
- gravecomic
- classical in formformally daring
- resolvedopen-ended
- cooloverwhelming
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About the book
- Author
- Ruta Sepetys
- First published
- 1999
- Pages
- 348
- Publisher
- Maeva, Penguin Audio, Turtleback Books
- Editions
- 20
- Language
- lit, English, French, Italian
- ISBN
- 9781410440839
Where to read
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On Open Library, 30 have read it and 174 want to.
Ruta Sepetys (Rūta Šepetys) is an internationally acclaimed author of historical fiction published in over fifty countries and thirty-six languages. Sepetys is considered a “crossover” novelist as her books are read by both students and adults worldwide. Her novels, Between Shades of Gray and Out of the Easy are both New York Times bestsellers and international bestsellers. Her latest novel, Salt to the Sea, is a #1 New York Times bestseller and winner of the Carnegie Medal. Her books have won or been shortlisted for over forty book prizes, are included on over twenty state reading lists, and are currently in development for film and television. Ruta is the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee.
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