Salt to the Sea
Ruta Sepetys, an international bestselling author, has finally written another book. For those of us who are fans of her previous works, Between Shades of Gray and Out of the Easy, we’re naturally excited. Her new work is called Salt to the Sea. Sepetys’ last 2 works were historical fiction, as long with her recent one.
The setting in Salt to the Sea is in Germany and Russia during the winter of 1945. It takes place towards the end of World War II. The narrator is centered around four teenagers. Each chapter is written in a different character’s point of view. The four main characters are Joana, Florian, Alfred, and Emilia.
Joana is a Lithuanian nurse. She is trying the run away from the guilt she feels about her past. Florian is a German soldier, who was being used by the army general, and stole artwork to get back at him. He is running away from the pain of his past, and the trouble he could get into. Alfred is a sociopathic German soldier. He believes he is normal and “high-up,” but in reality he is psychotic. He is running away from the wimpy kid he used to be. The last character is Emilia, who is Latvian. Latvians were one of the groups Hitler labeled as “undesirable.” She was trying to run away from the danger that her ethnicity caused. These four teenagers all end up on one boat, the Wilhelm Gustloff.
The overall plot of the story involves detailed counts of how these four teens end up on the ship, and why they wanted to be on it. Each of them are running away from some kind of trouble (or something from their past), and hope that being on that ship will save them.
My personal review on the book would have to be an eight out of ten. The beginning of the book is slightly slow, but picks up and gets pretty intense. The plot thickens significantly halfway through the book. I found myself on edge when it came down to the last few chapters. There seemed to be so many unanswered questions to be filled in such a small amount of time.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is interested in historical fiction. This book is a very interesting twist on World War II.
