Lina Vilkas is the main character in the novel Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys. Lina Vilkas is fifteen years old when she and her family are deported from their comfortable middle class home in Lithuania in 1941. Her father Kostas, a professor at the local university, is accused of the anti-Soviet activity of aiding in the repatriation of relatives back to Germany, thus branding the entire family criminals. Though young, Lina already knows that her passion in life is for drawing, and she is preparing to enter art school when she is ripped away from the only life she has ever known. Despite the hardships she endures upon deportation, she never ceases to stop her drawing. For Lina, drawing is a way to process the world, and is her best mode of expression. She is devoted to saving her family members, and risks her life multiple times throughout the novel in attempts to save her mother Elena and brother Jonas. She continues to document the horrors of the Baltic genocide through her drawings at the risk of certain death, and hopes to pass along the drawings to Kostas so that he may find out where she has been relocated. The entire novel is written from Lina’s first-person point of view, and the epilogue reveals that the work has been created from her preserved drawings and writings discovered decades later.
2.    a) Speak about favourite traits of character in a person.

b) The traits of character you detest.

c) Your own chief characteristics.

  

a)    I appreciate the simplicity and sincerity in people the most. For me the most important character traits are: friendly, modest, calm, quiet, merciful, patient, loyal, brave and hardworking. We are not ideal and none of us can have all the good traits, but it would be good to have at least most of them.

b)    We all have pros and cons, and I'm not against negative traits, because there are some that I have. But most of all I hate traits: mischievous, insincere, hypocritical, false, vulgar, two-faced, cruel, capricious, rude, harsh and rude. These are the most horrible traits we must avoid.

c)    I'm not ideal. As I wrote, I still have good and bad traits. I will be honest and write the ones I really possess: Goodness, but sometimes I am also selfish; I am caring, but sometimes I hate; communicable, but vengeful; good at heart, but sometimes bad; friendly and modest; simple and sincere; merciful and persevering; diligent and loyal. All these features belong to me, maybe they still are, but they are the main ones. What traits you use with me, I use those on you.
3.   Complete the following sentences using the word combinations and phrases (p. 223):

1.    When one is no longer young, it is not an easy thing to alter one’s habits. 2. The coat is a size too large for you, you must to alter it. 3. I’m tired of altered my plans every time you change your mind. 4. She had scarcely finished speaking before there was a ring at the bell and a knock. 5. Without a word she reach out pen and paper. 6. Lora reached out the letter, but the man was quick enough to catch hold of it. 7. She daren’t even reached out the switch lest the movement should wake him. 8. Clare is easily carried away; when she have a fancy she cannot think of anything else. 9. Some more cake? -Thank you, I have quite a fancy chocolate cake. 10. Dave had to do al kinds of odd jobs that came his way to keep body and soul together. 11. The movement David saw the car drove up to the house, he rushed out to meet his friends. 12. I found myself in a room be littered books, papers and all kind of lumber. 13. I’m at my wits’ end. I have not the least notion of where to look for you? 14. I have not the least notion what he’s hinting at. Do his words make sense to you? 15. I wish you remind, it just slipped my mind. 16. The movement he mentioned the incident, a dim recollection came back to me. 17. The clothes the man wore were terribly shabby, but that evidently did not bother him. 18. Ed had some difficulty in finding the place, a shabby building in an evil-smelling slum.