I wanted to enjoy this book so bad, but it just didn't measure up. The story in itself was decent, but the writing style was just so choppy and sporadic. The author would go on long tangents about things that didn't seem to make a large difference in the story (ex. what bugs were in the insect collection). Sometimes these tangents would run pages, breaking up any sense of story. A lot of these diversions were about people such as the zookeeper's wife's husband and son, acquaintances, guests, etc. This made me wonder why the book was even called the Zookeepers Wife, since most of the book didn't seem to be about her (I realize there was the sentence at the end where Jan said his wife was the real hero). Along with the long tangents, there were also a lot of short mentions of things that were oddly placed. For example, about a third of the way into the book, the author starts talking about how Antonina was bed ridden. Here it mentions he being pregnant, but this isn't mentioned again for another 100 or so pages. Just odd.