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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.
Audio CD, Unabridged , 6 CDs, 7 hours, 47 minutes
Published March 22nd 2011 by Penguin Audio
Historical fiction / YA
Sync!
My thoughts:
I read some reviews, and the author talked about it at the end too, what you ask? That people do not realise how many millions and millions of people that Stalin murdered. What school did you go to?!
Lithuania is occupied by Soviet. Her father is a professor and in the night they are taken away. Fascists bourgeoisie pigs as they are. They are sent to Siberia to work. To die.
Lina is 15 and loves to draw. Her brother Jonas is 10. Her mother has a coat filled with things to sell. I thought they had it bad first, but it actually gets worse. We only follow them for a year but it is a horrible year filled with death, tears, but also so much love. Love for each other and the will to go on. To survive and to get back to Lithuania (of course I googled, damn, either they were denied entry when the Soviet started to release prisoners in the 50s, or they were discriminated against.)
I cried, how could I not. There was this one part with a baby that just broke me.
I am so grateful for those that fought so we could keep our independence. We could easily have been the Baltics. No one should have to live under that Communist regime of terror.
It is a good book, it is a sad book. There is so much hope in the face of despair and I do not know how anyone could have survived what they did. But people survived, against all odds.
Narrator Emily Klein
I liked her voice for Lena, but to be honest she did not really do all the other voices that differently. But in the end it worked anyway cos the story was good.
One thing, in print it was surely obvious but here it was tricky with the flashbacks. Suddenly i was all wtf is Lena doing?? Oh, flashback.
Cover
ok
