A review by astridmark
The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman
3.0
I have a hard time rating this book. The story was really good, but the writing is a bit all over the place. A lot of time is spend on dwelling on unimportant issues, and not the main plot.
I was prepared to love this book, and it's definitely a story that needed to be told, maybe it should just have been told by another author, or as a short story. Because I do realise some of the fault may be on the source material, which seems to be mainly Antonina Zabinski's diary. And she, which I can understand, seemed to focus a lot more on the animals of the zoo and her son, then on the refugees' everyday life in their hiding places around the zoo. The writing also felt a bit to poetic, with a bit too many uneeded metaphors, considering it's a stark World War II story.
I was prepared to love this book, and it's definitely a story that needed to be told, maybe it should just have been told by another author, or as a short story. Because I do realise some of the fault may be on the source material, which seems to be mainly Antonina Zabinski's diary. And she, which I can understand, seemed to focus a lot more on the animals of the zoo and her son, then on the refugees' everyday life in their hiding places around the zoo. The writing also felt a bit to poetic, with a bit too many uneeded metaphors, considering it's a stark World War II story.