박서연's Reviews > Between Shades of Gray

Between shades of gray: In the midst of light and darkness

I read this book because of the teacher's recommendation. I expected the book because our teacher already have recommended funny books : A monster calls, out of my mind. But, this book made me spend a lot of my emotions, so I felt uncomfortable with this book. A description of this will be followed again. This book describes a story about Lina and her family forced to leave home by NKVD.

I have two impressive scenes in this book. First, it was the scene which Lina faced the death of a little yellow girl who was in the same train. I will explain about this scene a little bit. Lina was in the train, which everyone were suffered in. In the train she was sat down with a girl who always had a doll on her hand, but her hands were empty at that time because of the NKVD's soldier. He blew her dolls into the air and shot her head off. But Janaina, the little girl was still continuing the conservation with her doll. With Janina, Lina met another girl who was in the train. She was sick, and she was just before death. At the night, the doll of Janina said her, that the girl died. So Janina came to Lina and told her about it. Janina demanded to Lina to check her safety and said to people what happened. By the way Lina wanted to sleep, so she refuse Janina`s favor. The next day, Lina saw the little yellow girl died and she felt a strange emotion. The reason why this scene was impressive for me was that the existence of a doll which Janina believed was true.

The second reason was ‘because I wasn`t so shocked about the death of the yellow girl’. By reading this part I wasn`t much surprise of it, becasue many people were already died, and the era itself was a lot of people die. So I thought its not so grave. But not so long after, I noticed that my opinion was wrong. Human life is important in all situations. Whether it is in a populous country or in a small population, human life is always the same value. So it should not be judged that the life of one person is worth more than the life of another. By the way, I judged someone life and I had an wrong opinion.

Other impressive scene was, when the people in the train ride on the boat to go to ' America ', They were happy to go there but, the destination wasn`t America. It was another palce, which will suffer people. I was angry in this part because of the attitude of the circumstances. They tortured people by hope and considered them like a toy. So while reading this book I often thought, the NKVD's atrocities were similar with the atrocity that Japan had to Korea. Both of them harassed people by force and I think it is really mean.

While reading this book I tried to figure out the meaning of the title. At frist I felt that the title was strange, because the ' Shads ' and ' Gray ' had come to a similar existence. But I could infer that meaning by reading the book. I think maybe, the author wanted to tell about the situation of Lina by mentioning two similar colors. Lina currently stands between light and darkness. One step would lead her to face the light, but another step would fall her into endless darkness.

For me this book was not so fun, because the story was too drak to me, but l really want to recommend this book. It is good for get knowledge of NKVD and sharing feeling of victims.