Absolutely beautiful. Full review to come.

Between Shades of Grey tells the story of Lina, who is 15 years old, and her family who are all taken by the NKVD from their home in Lithuanian and packed onto a train in the middle of night for crimes unknown. Suddenly, Lina, whose only problem was getting into art school, suddenly has to face unimaginable cruelty, starvation and forced labour.

This book was so hard to read at times but in the style I came to know in Salt to the Sea, it was fast-paced and I got totally sucked in. It's so hard to comprehend that this happened to people, and that they were stuck in these situations for over 10 years!! And that these Baltic regions only actually got their independence in 1991, which is only 25 years this year and not really that long.

I didn't give this 5 stars because I just wasn't as sold on the 'romance' in this book. I thought the story would have made the same kind of impact if Lina didn't focus on Andruis in the second part of the story.

Overall, an amazing story about something that happened that I don't know much about. I feel like WW2 stories based in Eastern Europe are often forgotten in favour of stories set in Germany, France and England, yet some of the worst atrocities seemed to happen to the people of Eastern Europe. I really want to read more ww2 fiction set in these regions thanks to these fabulous stories by Ruta Sepetys.