YA Historical Fiction: Salt to the Sea, by Ruta Sepetys

 

Title: Salt to the Sea

Author: Ruta Sepetys

Publisher:  Philomel Books, 2017. 391 pages.

Source: Library

Publisher's Blurb:

Winter, 1945. Four teenagers. Four secrets.

Each one born of a different homeland; each one hunted, and haunted, by tragedy, lies…and war.

As thousands of desperate refugees flock to the coast in the midst of a Soviet advance, four paths converge, vying for passage aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship that promises safety and freedom.

Yet not all promises can be kept.

Inspired by the single greatest tragedy in maritime history, bestselling and award-winning author Ruta Sepetys (Between Shades of Gray) lifts the veil on a shockingly little-known casualty of World War II. An illuminating and life-affirming tale of heart and hope.  

My Review:

As I noticed when I read and reviewed Sepetys' Between Shades of Gray,  the author is very good at writing about the truly horrific times in human history without losing sight of the humanity of the people enduring it. In this case, she follows four young adults (ranging in age from about 16 to 21) who are caught up in the evacuation from East Prussia, Lithuania, and Poland as the Soviet army advances near the end of WWII. Each has a unique voice, and a unique story, told in first person. That could lead to confusion, but Sepetys simply gives each narrator a fresh chapter, headed with his or her name. I found no difficulty in following the different threads.

The four main characters are wildly different, but each has a secret, and each is tormented, in part by being thrust into adulthood prematurely, and in part by man's inhumanity to man. A big part of the draw of the story is the gradual unfolding of their secrets, though I felt a little as though I was sight-seeing at a train wreck at times--like I shouldn't be looking at their private horrors. And it's not just horrors--they have guilt, shame, and fear that drive them in so many ways.

A book about possibly the worst naval disaster of all time (9000 or more of the 10,000 people aboard the Wilhelm Gusloff drowned. That might be a spoiler but the blurb and the cover between them pretty well gave that away) cannot have an unadulterated happy ending. But as with her first novel, Sepetys manages to salvage the characters' humanity, and pulls something from the wreckage to prove that life does go on, and joy can be salvaged from despair, at least sometimes, and for some people.

[Mild spoilers here]

It quickly becomes evident to the reader that one of the narrators is a true believer of the Nazi doctrine, but it takes the whole book to see what else he is. This may be the most disturbing part of the book, and I think that Sepetys develops Alfred in a way that actually softens the realization that many people did support even the worst elements of the Third Reich, because the reader quickly sees that he is not a good person.

Overall, the writing is strong, the story is almost overwhelming, and the book will stay in the memory for a long time. I appreciate that I learned some history I never knew, too, even if it's very distressing history.

My Recommendation:

This is an excellent book for a young adult or adult reader, with or without any particular interest in WWII, though that will increase the interest. Due to adult situations and just too much human evil, this is not a book for younger readers. I would say high school and up.

In a nice development, due to a lack of other reading material, my college-age son and husband both read this as well. We were able to have some nice discussions about the development of the characters as well as the historical setting. My husband has some reservations about some of the motivations, but both he and my son found it an excellent read. I had no idea my kid knew so much history, but, then Russian is his major.
 

FTC Disclosure: I checked Salt to the Sea out of my local library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."  

Flash Fiction Friday: The Bartender and the Pirate

This week's Wendig Challenge had us rolling dice for three story elements: main character, setting, and conflict.  I rolled a bartender, a pirate ship, and and encounter with a nemesis.  For extra fun, a second roll on the first column gave me a detective.  I had the choice of making the second roll another character or an aspect of the main character, and opted for the latter.

Wendig gave us 2000 words this week.  I used 1804 of them.  I thought it was going to be light, but although there's some humor, it's not a children's story.

The Bartender and the Pirate

Lira stood at ease behind the bar, wiping glasses and listening to the words flowing around her.  No one ever paid attention to the bartender, and you could learn an amazing amount that way.  What Lira was learning tonight was that the pirate ship was back in the local waters, and people were afraid. No one seemed to know who the pirate was, whose ship had been haunting their shores off and on for several months.  When there were no fat merchant vessels to take, the pirates would land and take what they wanted, from livestock to women.

She shrugged to herself.  Pirates had been raiding this coast for years.  Centuries, probably, ever since the first boats sailed in and out of the harbor.  Pirates were a part of life along the coast.  Then a bit of conversation caught her attention.

"Dead, he was, just a-lying in the field with his throat cut, I tell you!"

"Never!  And him saying he could outrun or outfight any man on this coast."

"Looks like he was wrong."

Lira glanced down the bar.  Two grizzled shepherds had their faces buried in their beers, but she was pretty sure they'd been the speakers.  She recognized them, of course.  She knew everyone, even those who never came into a bar, or who would never come into a bar run by a woman.  "Taint decent," was the verdict of most of the women, but the men didn't care.  They came for the best beer and the chance to be waited on by something female.

And they told her things.  Enough that she had a guess, looking around the bar, who might not have been as fast or as fierce as he'd thought.  If she was right, he was no loss to the community.  Basher Gaffen was a bully and a coward, and if the pirates had taken him out, so much the better.

"Funny, though," the older of the two elders said, coming up out of his beer as though he'd heard Lira's thoughts.  "Ol' Basher wasn't killed with a cutlass like the pirates usually do.  His throat was slit as neat as neat, like a butcher with a hog, it was."

Lira grimaced.  That wouldn't be very neat--blood all over, more like.  But throat slitting with a fine knife--it didn't sound like pirates, though they'd likely enough get the blame.  She sighed.  No doubt that was what the killer intended.  The only question was whether she'd put it right.

Two hours later, Lira knew she would let the pirates take the blame.  That was when she finally met the unknown pirate.  The unknown pirate was all too well known to her.   She would let the bastard hang and dance on his grave.

First she had to escape.

Lira had gone to look at the place where the dead man had been found, after the bar shut down.  It was the middle of the night, but since she didn’t expect to find anything there anyway, she figured a lantern would cast enough light to show her that any evidence had been trampled by those who came to take the corpse away.  She could then agree that whoever had done it, they’d done the village a favor, and could go get some sleep.

The lantern gave away her location to the pirates, who had come back and were in a nasty mood.  Lira knew she was in real trouble, but it might have been worse, at least in the short term, if the Pirate King himself hadn’t been there.  As a result, she was still alive and whole.  She was also bound, gagged, and parked in the bilges awaiting his decision about how to kill her, but that could be overcome.

The pirate king’s real name was Norman, though none of his men knew that.  Or none had known, until they’d taken Lira.  She’d recognized him at once, even though it had been years since they’d been in school together, and he’d grown a lot since then.  He’d been a victim back then, a scrawny kid struggling under the burden of a name that invited teasing.  He’d retaliated with underhanded plots that got other students in trouble for things he did, usually those with no one to defend them.  Just the way these pirates operated.

Now Norman was the fierce and feared Pirate King, and he would not forgive Lira for revealing his true name to the men he led.

She would never forgive him for getting her tossed out of school.

Lira cursed herself for a fool.  She knew better than to go roaming in the night when the pirates were on the loose.  The Pirate King had decided they were his personal supply house, and Lira stood in his way.  She figured she had at most an hour or so before he made up his mind whether to skin her, hang her, or just throw her overboard.  And that would almost certainly be after giving her to his crew for a while.

She had no intention of sticking around for any part of it.  Working off her right shoe, she bent down until she could hook a toe into the gag.  Fortunately it was a warm night, and she wasn’t wearing socks.  The gag wasn’t tight—Norman had only put it on to stop her telling the men about his past; she wouldn’t get anywhere by screaming in any case.  The ship was standing about a half mile off the shore.

With the gag removed, she could use her teeth on the bonds securing her hands.  It took a long time, but Norman had insisted on tying her up himself—probably to keep her from telling his men what he really was like—and he still wasn’t any better with knots than he had been as a boy.  If a real sailor had done it, she’d have been sunk.

Lira dropped the last loop of rope into the stinking bilge water and stood up cautiously.  She felt around for her shoe and slid it back on, unwilling to risk stepping on something nasty in her bare feet.  The only question now was if she would expose Norman to his crew and let them take care of him, kill him herself, or play it safe and just dive overboard and swim for shore. 

The pirates decided it for her.  When she crept to the hatch and peered out, hoping to find the crew asleep and only perhaps a single watchman dozing by the wheel, she found instead that the entire crew was gathered around the Captain’s cabin, where Norman was engaged in a heated argument with someone she couldn’t see.

Lira stepped out of her shoes.  They would make a noise she couldn’t afford.   Moving silently from shadow to shadow, Lira got close enough to hear the discussion, and she smiled.

Norman was in trouble.  His crew wanted to know how a guy named “Norman” could make himself a Pirate King, and why they should follow him.  He was soft—too soft to even kill a troublesome female.

Lira was in trouble, too.  The crew was making it clear that if he wanted to remain a Pirate King, Norman was going to have to prove his bloodthirsty credentials.  On her.  And she had no doubt that he would.  Nothing she’d heard suggested that Norman had learned mercy since leaving school, and she was willing to bet he’d moved on from sneaking to murder.  He wasn’t a scrawny kid any more, and he’d never been soft. 

The knife he wore as his belt, as she’d noted earlier, was sharp and lethal.  Exactly the sort of knife that had ended the life of Basher Gaffen.  And Basher had been one of those who tormented Norman back in their school days.  He’d tormented everyone, right up until Norman had slit his throat in the field on the far side of the harbor.

“An’ let’s see you lead us in and clean out that stinking town once and for all!  We’ve had enough of sneaking.  Burn it, kill ‘em, take all the women.  Unless you’re some kind of sissy!”

Lira had heard enough.  She moved silently back away from the crowd toward the bow.  Shedding overshirt and skirt, she slid through the hole where the anchor chain ran, swung as low as she could over the water, and let go, pointing her toes to enter the water as cleanly as possible.

She wasn’t quite silent enough.  Some keen-eared pirate had heard the splash.  A yell and the sound of many bare feet crossing the deck warned Lira, once she’d resurfaced, that she’d been spotted.  She struck out for shore with a steady stroke, diving once or twice when she heard pistols fire.  The single-shot monsters were not terribly accurate, and she kept her course. 

It took the pirates several minutes to bring the vessel about to follow her.  Even as she swam for her life, Lira thought Norman must not be the seaman he imagined himself, or he’d have lowered a boat, rather than bringing the ship in so close to shore.  The men had their blood up too and no one was thinking.  Raising her head to orient herself, she saw she was directly off the headland to the south of the harbor.  There was enough moonlight to make out the form of the land, but not enough to see what lay in the water.

She glanced back.  The ship was coming after her.   The wind had picked up and the pirates came on at speed.

With a grim smile she set a faster stroke and made for the point.  She would pass over the rocks, mostly.


Lira stood dripping and half-naked on the shore, shivering even on this mild night after twenty minutes in the cold waters.  She was cut and bruised from a landing among the rocks through rough surf.  But she smiled as she watched the pirate ship, sails still set, wallow and break apart against the rocks that had lain hidden just below the waves.

She’d never finished school after he’d gotten her kicked out for lewd behavior.  But she’d done just fine.  Norman had finished school, and it had made him a Pirate King.  But he wouldn’t trouble anyone any longer.  Some of the men might make it to shore.  Norman would not be among them, even if he thought to shed sword, cutlass, knives and pistols before they dragged him to the bottom.

Norman couldn’t swim.  Basher had made sure of that.  It made a nice sort of circular revenge.

The case, thought Lira, was nicely wrapped up.  She turned toward the village, cursing a bit as she realized she had to walk a mile home barefoot.  Still, it was a small price to pay.

#

©Rebecca M. Douglass 2014

Flash Fiction Friday: On a Distant Island, Far From Home

This week's flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig involved a list of 20 settings, and a random number generator.  Write a story set in that setting, 1000 words max (I hit 880) .  Totally straight-forward. I liked several of the possible settings (I may come back to "a Starbuck's during the Apocalypse").  I got lucky.  The RNG gave me:

A Distant Island, Far From Home

Xavier Xanthum, Space Explorer had been reading.  Not much was happening in his sector, and the Wanderlust's computer held every book written in human space.  So Xavier'd been wandering blissfully through what the computer called "adventure narratives of Earth's pre-space century."  Treasure Island, Shipwrecked, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson.  The list was long, and most of them seemed to involve islands in a warm sea.

So when he found the little moon off of SLVD 3246, what Xavier saw was a little Island paradise.  The Wanderlust scanned the databanks and the moon itself, and told him it had warm oceans, sand beaches, a breathable atmosphere and no intelligent inhabitants.  Everything he needed for a holiday, though some faint hint of caution lingered, no doubt put there by Larry, the disembodied telepathic eyeballs which were the computer's manifestation in his own head.  Larry always was the cautious part of the crew, as well as best at repairs in enclosed spaces.

Xavier ignored Larry's worries and sent the boss a hyper-space message to say he was taking some vacation days.  Then he set the ship down.

For the first day or two he lived his dream.  With no treasure map and no storms or cannibalistic natives, Xavier enjoyed his island more than most of the characters in the books he lay on the beach reading.  He didn't have a robot, so he had to go into the ship for the little drinks with umbrellas that his historic guide to the island of Fiji, somewhere on Earth, indicated were necessary to the proper enjoyment of a beach, but aside from that minor inconvenience it was perfect.

The first signs of trouble, or at least annoyance, came on the second day.  The little furry creatures--odd that they would be furry, like Earth squirrels, in such a warm place--found him where he lay on the beach and began scampering all over him.  One stuck its nose in his drink.

"Hey!  Geddoutahere!"  He brushed them away, laughing.  They kept coming back, but they were kind of cute and didn't bite, so after a while he ignored them and went back to reading.

It was the third morning that he discovered that the little creatures weren't just cute and furry, and that the scanners were wrong when they said there was no sentient life on the  little moon.  That was when Xavier came out of his ship after breakfast, armed with coffee cup and reader panel (connected wirelessly to the ship's computer, of course, so he could go on reading that endless supply of Earth novels) and caught one of the critters hauling off something that looked suspiciously like a chunk of his right retro-thruster.

"What?  Hey!  Put that back!"  The little fur-thing gave him the sort of look that said he was in trouble, and kept right on going, back to the distant clump of vegetation he'd been too indolent to explore.  Xavier started to follow, thought better of it, and went back into the ship.

"Larry, are all systems operative for take-off?"  The computer was silent for a long moment, which Xavier considered a bad sign in something that thought at more or less the speed of light.

"No, Captain Xanthum."  The computer managed to sound apologetic.  "I regret to report that the retro-thrusters are non-responsive."

"That's because some kind of local rodent has hauled them off! Can we take off without them?"

"No."

"Well, dammit, you'd better think of something, because while I enjoyed reading about Robinson Crusoe, I have no desire to spend the rest my life on a desert island!  I want to go home!"  It didn't matter that the ship was all the home Xavier had.  It was the principal of the thing.

Offended, the computer fell silent, and Xavier went back outside, leaving Larry to himself.  Larry couldn't function outside the ship, anyway.  What had gone wrong with the automatic perimeter defense?  Had the nasty creatures hauled that off, too?

There was only one thing to do, and Xavier did it.  He went back inside.  "Ship!" he commanded.  "Another pina colada!"

Six little umbrellas later, Xavier Xanthum knew what to do, and had the means to do it.  He had managed to keep the furballs away from the remaining retro-thrusters, and tracked them to their lair. Definitely intelligent, and so much for the computers, scans, and everything else that had promised an uninhabited paradise.

Armed with a bottle of tequila and a handful of shallow dishes, he headed for the grove of trees where the creatures had their base.  An hour later, Xavier emerged, weaving slightly, but carrying the parts purloined by the local inhabitants.  Behind him, the fur-covered natives slept the sleep of the inebriated, as Xavier crawled under his ship and reinstalled the essential parts.  His head throbbed by the time he finished, and he cast a quick look in the direction of the trees.  No movement yet.

Climbing back inside, he addressed the computer.  "Get us out of here, fast.  Before they wake up."  He didn't take his eyes off the grove of trees until they were out of sight.  Those furry things had appreciated the introduction of alcohol into their lives.  He just didn't think they would be as appreciative when they discovered the hangover.