Salt to the Sea

It is not often that a book as special as this one comes around. Ruta Sepetys’s prose shines in this haunting fictional account of the most tragic maritime disaster in history. Captivating, heart-wrenching with characters that I won’t ever forget, Salt to the Sea will be embedded in my heart for years to come.Salt to the Sea is set during World War II during the Soviet advance in Prussia. Hundreds of thousands of people were being pushed west by the advance, all leading to the port on the edge the Baltic Sea. At the end of their journey, ships waited to help the refugees evacuate. The author notes at the end that nearly 2 million people were evacuated during this time.This book narrated by four teenagers, each of different nationalities and vastly different backgrounds. They had their own histories, secrets, and journeys. Joana, a Lithuanian nurse who desperately wants to reunite with her mother; Florian, a young man with secrets that could threaten his life; Emilia, a young Polish girl harboring her own secret; and Alfred, a sociopathic German sailor who longs for power.This book was beautifully written from start to finish. For me, it was the characterization that stood out. Each of these characters felt like real people. Even the secondary characters—Klaus, Eva, Ingrid, the Shoe Poet—were memorable and compelling.There were so many moments that were so heavy that left me with a bone deep sadness. Many of those moments seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. The characters couldn’t dwell on the horrific things they saw and experienced. They were forced to see, accept, and move on."I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes when I did really good job at pretending, I even fooled myself."After the characters boarded the Wilhelm Gustloff, any relief I felt was short-lived. A sense of dread was on the horizon and once it arrived, I was panicking. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. I almost broke my cardinal rule and flipped to the final page! GASP!"The woman in the mirror was frightening, especially when I realized that she was me. My face was caked with soot, my eyes ringed with grief from the things they had seen. I had lived for twenty-one years, but the recent months had changed me. I scrubbed at the dried blood and grime beneath my fingernails, thinking of the remorse I would never be able to wash down a sink."Several times, I had to pause and absorb what I was reading because it was so sad. Many scenes were so gruesome and horrifying. At one point, the characters cross paths with a flood of people trying to evacuate. Among them, were a couple of parentless children traveling alone on the back of the family ox. It’s noted that the girl’s pants were too short for her and her little legs were black with frostbite due to the subzero temperatures. After the ship was hit and sinking, mothers were throwing their babies into the lifeboats but missed the target. Mothers and children were trampled in the stairways as people rushed to get to deck.Each chapter switches to a different character. So in the beginning while I was trying to get to know each narrator, it was a bit jarring to be constantly switching point-of-view. Eventually, I settled in and the switching felt seamless, smooth, and natural. I couldn’t put this book down.It’s a sign of a good book when you find yourself thinking about the characters after you turn the last page. The author is done with the characters’ story, but the reader fantasizes about the next unwritten chapter in their lives. I wonder where they are this very moment. Are they happy?The vast amount of research that Sepetys must have had to conduct is astounding and overwhelming just to think about. What an enormous amount of talent she has. I cannot wait to read her other books.Sepetys marries together heart-pounding action and thoughtful characterization, delivering a tragic tale with a heavy dose of hope. It’s not often that I get emotional when reading but I finished this book with tears in my eyes and smile on my face.Audiobook Comments:It’s always scary to listen to a book you loved so much. What if the narrators don’t do the characters justice? What if the delivery was way off-the-mark? My worries were put to rest. The four narrators who portrayed each character did a fantastic job. The narrator for Emilia was particularly wonderful. Emilia was so brave and resilient yet so fragile and I thought that the narrator’s delivery of those things came through. Alfred’s narration was so perfect. His character was borderline insane and he clearly had a inferiority complex. The arrogance that the narrator infused in his narration was perfect.* I received an advanced copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. I also received an audiobook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

• A very easy, captivating read. Quick pace with extremely short chapters (2-3 pages long), each almost always ending in a mini cliffhanger that drives you to keep reading breathlessly to the end. Kudos to the author for the incredible pace of this book!• This is a historical-fiction reenactment of an epic tragedy that occurred in the final year of WWII, one that not a lot of people knew about before this book came out. I personally did not know about this tragedy. While the book was light on details, it did spur my interest in the multiple Wikipedia pages on the Wilhelm Gustloff, Gauleiter Erich Koch, and the Amber Room treasure.• The author gave the barest of details to drive the plot fast, which made for fast consumption. Indeed, I think this was one of the few books I’ve ever consumed so quickly. That said, there’s not a lot of character development. There is no omniscient narrator to give broader settings or more details about the political landscape or exposition on other imminent threats outside these four perspectives. There are only the four main characters (all fictional) from which all narration comes. Each character is filled out just enough to drive curiosity about their secrets and what has brought them together at this point in history. However, you can feel those invisible threats in the words and thoughts of these diverse characters. The secrets each character holds close are eventually exposed and are well done by the author.• I see why the book has won so many awards because it compels you to finish it and learn what happened in real life. However, it’s written for a YA (young adult) audience, so the depth of vocabulary and length of descriptions are fairly shallow; it’s straightforward drama with occasional hints at emotional trauma. There are very few (if any?) allegories, and the callbacks/flashbacks are (for the most part) thinly disguised skeletal motifs running through the book: shame, innocence lost, storks, parent-child separations, theft (of life & treasures), and survivor’s guilt. The scenes are brief and focus almost exclusively on the dialogue and interplay between the characters (typical for a YA novel, I suppose). And this is precisely why this format works so well because you experience a sort of hyper-focus, first-hand account common to most war victims amidst their plights. These people are NOT going to be going on and on about clothing, vistas, settings, meals, or guessing at any minor flaws in other characters or themselves. They are only concerned with one thing: survival. For better or worse, these restrictive perspectives keep you in the dark, just as the characters are kept, wondering about their collective fates, and hoping against all odds that they survive.• For me, the ending was too abrupt. I wanted a bit more of a denouement, but I also appreciate what the author did in those sparse final two chapters. By wrapping the tale up very quickly, it keeps the senselessness of the tragedy present in your mind long after you’re done reading it.• Finally, the research notes the author gives at the rear of the book are good to read. The interviews with divers, survivors, museum curators, and others are EXCELLENT—do not skip these! They show how extensive her research was into every aspect of these displaced people’s lives, with the number of affected children running into the hundreds of thousands. It’s a shame the author chose not to include more of the details, particularly in those final sparse chapters. In fact, I was surprised to learn she’d actually walked the same tract and saw the same lagoon as the characters; that’s because those details did not make it into the book to any great extent. However, more space was devoted (and rightfully so) to focus on the passengers of the Wilhelm Gustloff and the harbor of Gotenhafen, gathered from Ms. Sepetys’s personal research; I appreciated that very much. Also, her tale has sparked an intense curiosity in me to know more about these people, this tragedy, and the ending of WWII.

I would recommend this book, for teens as well as adults. The book teaches you about WW2, but about the neighboring countries affected by the war -- Prussia, Poland, Lithuania. Most history books skip over these countries with a few sentences. The book is written in a unique way, so that you see one incident, from the viewpoint of several different characters. How did the 15 yr old girl see it? The prussian soldier? the Nurse? This makes for an interesting read. I feel that the true situation was probably worse than depicted, but this is good. If the book depicted the full intense brutality, we could not read it. I have seen that criticism, that it is about the harshness of war, and of death. That is what we need to read, so that war is not glorified. It is not gruesome, or overly macabre. The ending is fairly happy, though I doubt the characters actually would have survived the freezing weather.