There are many different ways to tell a story: books, movies, TV shows, video games, miming, interpretive dance. This is a non-fiction book, so I could review it based on the story it tells. But I won't do that. I will review it as a book, and as a book, it seems intent on obscuring the true story instead of illuminating it.

The true story: two Polish zookeepers, Antonina and Jan, helped hide refugees during World War II. Jan was a critical part of the Warsaw uprising. Antonina wrote a lot. The end.

Ackerman's brief examination on the Nazis' obsession with eugenics would make a nice magazine article. But she does nothing to enrich or enhance this story as a full-length book. Her writing is full of inconsistencies, digressions, and repetitions which detract from the emotional core. As a nature writer, she spends too much time talking about animals when unnecessary, like an entire page on beetles. One passage I flagged early on includes a numerous descriptions of how animals move *and* the fact that the pogo stick was invented in 1919. Pointless.

Ackerman is a nature writer, so I guess it makes sense that she writes about animals. But she writes about them at the expense of human characters. Even the animal characters aren't developed or given respect. Ackerman tries to act like they're as important as the humans, but when a beloved pet hamster drinks itself to death, Ackerman writes it almost as if it were a joke. No grieving is mentioned.

Her organization of the basic story is startlingly poor. At least one entire chapter fails to mention the zoo or the zookeepers at all. At one point, the family is forced to flee the zoo because it might be bombed. Away, Antonina hopes the teenagers in charge of the zoo will take care of the animals. Um, why are they there if everyone had to evacuate, and maybe she should be worrying about them surviving an air strike. Later, Antonina watches a muskrat on the porch each morning. She soon moves him into the kitchen. He escapes, and her son wants help looking for the animal. Ackerman writes "still bedridden, Antonina couldn't help." What? When did that happen? In Chapter 20, Ackerman jumps from Autumn 1942 to Spring 1943 back to June 1942 within two pages. Chapter 31 is exceptionally awful in its careless logic: "Nothing had changed in the villa's roster or routines." Literally a page later: "Most Guests had already left to join the army or escaped."

I'm unsure if Ackerman didn't do her research or is just terrible at organization. Whatever the reason, if Ackerman doesn't care enough about her details to organize them correctly, why should I?

To make matters worse, her writing on a sentence-by-sentence level is clumsy. "Antonina's choice of composer says much about her personality and the atmosphere of the villa." That would be a wonderful concluding sentence to a paragraph if this were a high-school English essay. Ackerman also says over and over again that a quote she uses is something "Antonia writes in her memoir" or "Antonia wrote" or "Antonia inked." Ackerman says in her preface that every time she quotes Antonina it comes from her memoirs or interviews. There is no need to clutter the writing with so many of these phrases.

Furthermore, her word choice is sometimes poor or, when it is passable, she repeats it, as if she's so proud she managed to coherently string a few words together that she uses them again. In once instance, she uses the phrase "ribboned with blood" twice in eight pages, although that suggests that W.W. Norton publishers needs a better editor. (Hello! There is also a totally random comma on the very second page.) Ackerman refers to Antonina as "the top matryoskha" which makes no sense. A matryoshka is a nesting doll. There isn't one on top, although there is one on the outside, which serves as a nest for the rest. And considering Poland's contentious relationship with Russia, why use a Russian metaphor at all?

Ugh.

Let's play, "What were they thinking?" On the back of the book Jonathan Safran Foer says "I can't imagine a better story or storyteller." He must be under contract to say something positive about any book that deals with Jews fleeing the Holocaust, because a Roomba with a dying battery would tell a better story than Ackerman does here.

I think this book annoys me so much for two reasons. 1) It's was published like this. Again, a good editor could have made it passable. 2) Ackerman treats her subjects like the Germans treated the zoo: carelessly, leaving us to sift through the rubble.

The worst phrase is this one: "Time usually glides with an incoherent purr." Tell me, Diane, what's the difference between a coherent purr and an incoherent one? And since when does time make noise?

Replace "time" with "this book" and the worst phrase in the book would become the most accurate.