Review: Friday Brown by Vikki Wakefield

4 Stars

"They call me Friday. It has been foretold that on Saturday I will drown..."

Friday Brown's mother has frequently told tales of their female ancestors, who each acquired the Brown family curse that tragically all ended their life. Friday and her mother travel from to town in the outback desert as they attempt to elude the family curse, however fate leaves Friday alone after her mother's abrupt death. 

"I am nothing. I feel like nothing. I want my life to matter. What if one day I'm gone and Nobody ever I knew existed."

Seventeen year old Friday makes a decision to continue her past lifestyle of traveling, and meets the lonely boy named Silence at the train station. He introduces her to a group of street kids, who she is able to relate to and become dependent on. It is on the other hand the charismatic Arden - the group leader who will challenge Friday more than she would she like. 

Friday Brown came nothing close to what I envisaged, especially the end which had left me stunned. The book was split into two parts. I view the first part as being fundamental in providing the reader simply with the backgrounds of each of the the street kids. The second parts unravels each character and shows their true nature and growth, or how some of the characters have come to disintegrate as a human, and the transformation of all the characters can evidently be displayed by the change of setting in the book, from the city in part 1 to a ghostown in the outback in part 2. 

Review: Between Shades of Grey by Ruta Sepetys

                                                4 Stars

I did not look good after I finished 'Between shades of gray'. My nose could have passed as the red nosed reindeer. It had become an awful shade of red from the sobbing. Similar to my close friend, I’m frankly not a big fan of books that will give me a headache from the crying that I have to withstand, coincidentally one my favourite genre is historical-fiction and history has a lot of grieve. Too much. I hate to cry and I prefer to sit silently and concentrate on a blank wall or an object, so tears do not spill out. But I failed to do so for this book. 

The first and second part of this book had strangely no effect on my emotions, but the third section of the book really warmed me up to the human compassion people were able to display, in a time of disaster. 

Between shades of grey is different from other WWII books, because it does not focus on an event that is widely known by the world, but the one that has been overlooked quite some time by history as inconsequential. 

The Baltic countries beside Russia such as Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland also suffered greatly in WWII. Between shades of gray captures the hardship one of the Baltic counties had to go through.