The Zookeeper's Wife

Interesting book. It was not the story I was expecting. I was so tempted while reading it to do research. But I held myself back knowing it would ruin the flow of the book for me.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this book. I'd been vaguely interested in it because of the WW2 angle and from my friends' reviews, but have been putting off reading it for awhile.

I mostly read via the audiobook from the library, and the narrator was one of the best I've ever listened to. That's partly what helped the book gain a five-star rating.

I was a zoo aficionado as a kid. I loved zoos so much that my family had a national zoo membership and we did zoo tourism. :) I'd pick a zoo over a theme park any day! So all the zoological detail in the book was really interesting and vivid to me.

Then all the WW2 stuff just had me on the edge of my seat. The sheer odds against this couple were overwhelming, and I kept expecting horrible things to happen (which they did, of course, but not as horrible as they could have been). I loved all the Resistance details!

Highly recommended.

Couldn't finish. I expect a novelish memoir out of a novelist. But no, there was no narrative and little plot. It was a sentence of plot for every page of detail. Insanely hard to read.

Excellent - I much preferred this view of WW II to In the Garden of Beasts. Ackerman finds a unique perspective in the story of the Warsaw zoo and its many inhabitants (of all species!).

Very interesting read.

A zookeeper and his wife hide Polish Jews in their zoo during the Nazi occupation. I liked the information presented about Poland during WWII. This is a part of world history that I knew little about. The book seemed to jump around, from the Jewish people to zoo animals.