I love historical fiction and this was nonfiction and lacked,for me, some of the loveliness of historical fictions ability to weave together a story. I also think Jan, the husband, sounded like a real grump maybe due to war but he seemed almost emotionally abusive to his brace, intelligent wife.

I made the mistake of thinking this was historical fiction and not non fiction, so I had to wrap my head around that. While there was tons of researched information, I felt a few things could have been left to a page as opposed to a whole chapter. As a Jew, I must say that I learned new horrors of the holocaust that I hadn't learned before, which amazed me on one hand and deeply saddened me on the other. An interesting account of a family's bravery.

I listened to the unabridged audiobook and hearing the proper pronunciation of words in the correct accent really made it feel as though someone was telling me a story. Well, nightmare, more like it. That these horrors took place less than 100 years ago is beyond me.

Ackerman finds the perfect balance of mixing the historical with the personal. And makes me wonder if, given the horrible opportunity, would I be so willing to risk my life as the Zabinski's did.

Maybe 2.5 stars. I really wanted to like this book but for me there wasn’t a coherent story. It seemed more like a description of people who found refuge in the zoo sprinkled with confrontations with the SS and excerpts from memoirs and interviews. The book picked up by Chapter 27.

For a country that was hugely impacted by the Nazi party in World War II, I knew next to nothing about what happened in Poland. Their wartime history was captivating and tragic. The zookeeper and his wife were the perfect lens to highlight the Polish rebellion in the face of evil and oppression. Utterly fascinating.

Read this book!!!

Great story of occupied Warsaw, Poland, and the risks everyday people took to protect Jewish people.

Very interesting read.

Reader, beware!
If you, like me, picked up this book expecting a story, based on the true life of a real WWII Zookeeper's wife, put the book down for a second.
Really!
Put it down and take a second to re-calibrate before you dive into it.
I initially wanted to rate this a 1 star because it was so far from what I expected based on the synopsis I read and that made it very hard to get into. Reading the back cover, you're led to believe you're reading historical fiction based on a true story and that the book will read like a novel (that's what I assumed, at least). But you don't get that and if that's what you want to read, you might have a hard time with this. While you do get the story of the Zabinski family and their efforts to save their neighbors and themselves during WWII, the book is not presented in a true narrative form. Rather than reading like a novel, it reads like an intense research project.
But that's not a bad thing.
The author is thorough and clearly researched everything she could to inform her understanding of the world and motives of people that came into contact with the Zabinski family. She presents information on the history and back-breeding of animals and plants as it was pertinent to Nazi agendas, for example, and while that wasn't intrinsically linked to the family at the heart of the book, it was a fascinating bit of information that brought the WWII era a bit more to life and taught me something new. There is something of historical fiction style writing in the way Ackerman weaves pieces of her source material (like memoirs and letters) together and how she fills in the blanks in the day to day business of the story but it does not read like a novel. Furthermore, while the bulk of the text does focus on Mrs. Zabinski and uses her memoir heavily, the book itself is not really her story as much as it is her family's, her home's and her city's.
It is how thoroughly the topic and people were researched and how, for the most part, accessibly the information was presented that made me keep going and ended in a 3 star review. I like to read research books and learn about different times in history through various lenses so I was able to continue with this once I gave up the idea that it was a novel. I'm not sure that the average reader in search of a WWII novel would have the same experience. If you want something that reads like All the Light We Cannot See or Salt to the Sea, you're not going to find it within this book. You might learn something new if you stick with it though.