Book Review: The Zookeeper’s Wife
The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story by Diane Ackerman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Polish zookeeper Jan Zabinski and his wife Antonina hid over three hundred people in their zoo during the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II.
I really wanted to like this book a lot more than I did. The premise sounded so intriguing to me. However, I never felt invested in the story or the people. The sequence of events seemed confusing to me – it either jumped around in time or details I needed to understand what was going on were left out. There were so many people who were mentioned briefly and then mentioned again several pages later that I couldn’t keep track of them.
I expected that the author would go into more of the details of how the Jewish people were hidden in the zoo and how the Underground worked. This story seemed to focus more on what the Jewish people who came to the zoo did before the war and also on the Zabinski’s animals.
I still found aspects of this book very interesting and I did learn quite a few things about World War II and the Nazis that I didn’t know before so I think it was worth reading.
By this book at:
Amazon
