A Study Guide for Ruta Sepetys's "Salt to the Sea"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Ruta Sepetys's "Salt to the Sea", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780028671369

Book preview

13

Salt to the Sea

Ruta Sepetys

2016

Introduction

In Ruta Sepetys's Salt to the Sea (2016), a small band of refugees flee East Prussia in advance of the approaching Soviet Red Army in the final days of World War II. Suspicious of each other and hiding secrets of their own, a Lithuanian nurse, a Prussian art conservator, and a Polish girl pregnant at the age of fifteen come together in their frantic rush to escape, but the ship waiting to take them away is none other than the Wilhelm Gustloff, a vessel destined to go down in history.

Blending fiction with history, Sepetys retells the tragic true story of the sinking in 1945 of the Wilhelm Gustloff from the eyes of its young passengers, all of them with a hope in their hearts for a new life. The largest maritime disaster in history, the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff claimed the lives of the majority of its passengers. Florian, Emilia, and Joana must hang on tight to their dreams and each other in order to get out of the war and the Wilhelm Gustloff alive.

Author Biography

Sepetys was born in Detroit, Michigan, on November 19, 1967. Her father, a Lithuanian, survived nine years in refugee camps before he was resettled in the United States. Her family's passion for the arts led Sepetys to pursue opera in college. However, she soon changed tracks to graduate with a degree in international finance from Hillsdale College in Michigan. Following graduation, she spent twenty years working in the music industry. In 1994, she launched the Sepetys Entertainment Group, Inc, an entertainment management firm. In 2006, she married her husband, Michael Smith. Her first novel, Between Shades of Grey, was published in 2011, followed by Out of the Easy in 2013 and Salt to the Sea in 2016.

Sepetys was awarded the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Resident Fellowship, and Salt to the Sea won the Carnegie Medal and reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Sepetys was inspired to write Salt to the Sea by the story of her father's cousin, who was meant to be a passenger aboard the doomed Wilhelm Gustloff but was left at port when the ship sailed. Though she was distraught to be left behind in the evacuation, her life was saved as a result. Sepetys's work has been published in fifty countries and thirty-six languages. She is considered a crossover novelist, with broad appeal to both adult and teen readers. She lives with her family in a treehouse in Tennessee.

Plot Summary

Note that chapters are unnumbered in the text. The chapter numbers below are for organizational purposes only.

1–4

Salt to the Sea begins as Joana, a Lithuanian