Salt to the Sea

Salt to the Sea

By Ruta Sepetys

Winter 1945. WWII. Four refugees. Four stories.

Each one born of a different homeland; each one hunted, and haunted, by tragedy, lies, war. As thousands desperately 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. But not all promises can be kept . .

I was under a mistaken impression of this book.  I thought it was going to be like All the Light We Cannot See, but it's actually marked "YA" and was very short and easy to read.  Not like, short-short, but all the chapters are like, two pages each.  There's a lot of blank space in the book.  I finished it in less than two hours.  Salt to the Sea takes the viewpoints of four characters: a fifteen year old pregnant Polish girl, a repatriating Lithuanian nurse, a Nazi forger fleeing with treasure, and a budding young sociopath.  

As children's books about WWII go, it's not really breaking much new ground in the ideas that war is hell, Nazis were awful, and crimes against humanity were committed on a massive scale.  Where it does excel is in covering a geographic area and event that doesn't get much press: the sinking (spoiler!) of the Wilhem Gustlof off the coast of what is now Poland. It also focuses more on the shrinking eastern front of the war, as the Russians approached, sowing devastation and rape indiscriminately on whichever women were in their path.  There's also no shying away from the mass rapes committed by the Russians in their march west, as it plays a vital role in Emilia's story.

We spend a lot of time with the refugees just trying to get on to the boat, and relatively little on board, which makes sense, since the ship's journey was only supposed to take two days, and they were sunk ten hours into the trip.  It's a fascinating and engrossing look at the event, but obviously a KYA book can't be all things at once: there's a lot of side plot about Florian stealing bits from the Amber Room which his Nazi mentor hid away, which adds more subplot about another WWII mystery that I don't think the book necessarily needs (especially as Sepetys' tying it in this way is complete speculation), and it cuts what is perhaps the saddest note about the sinking: because it carried some Nazi officials, the boat was not marked as a hospital ship, so under the "rules of war" (what an oxymoron) the sinking of thousands of refugees and civilians was not a war crime.  Not that I think that thousands of women and children fleeing an encroaching army should shield Nazis, but it's such an ironic and poignant detail, I'm sorry that Sepetys wasn't able to work it in somehow.

It's fairly well written, all the parts with Alfred made my skin crawl (intentionally so) although I did kind of love that Hannelore's last proclamation to him was her Jewishness, a last "Fuck you" to the ultimate fuckboy.  The multiple narrators actually worked well for this, as we got both a variety of viewpoints and didn't spend too much time on any one person. 


19: A Book Told From Multiple POVs