The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman

Despite my discouraging beginning thoughts which were along the lines of "This sounds like a history textbook," I rather liked The Zookeeper's Wife. 


The reason my initial impression of this book was bad was because I was expecting a historical fiction. I'm not much into nonfiction. I generally don't read it for entertainment (though I was momentarily tempted by A Brief History of Time). 


But if you approach it as nonfiction with historical fiction bits thrown in, you shouldn't be too perturbed. It took me about half of the book to get used to her style. When I'm reading nonfiction, I don't want to read historical fiction, and especially prose like hers, which borders on the purple at times (but isn't so bad as Frankenstein). When I'm reading historical fiction, I want a story, not what happened at the time this book was written. But once you get past that, the book is pretty decent, on the whole. I say that honestly, completely aside from the fact that I would feel bad writing a deeply criticizing review about a subject like the Holocaust. 


I enjoyed the little vignettes she put in about other refugees and other characters in the story, but I think there could have been a lot more structure. The whole storyline with Heinz and his brother's rivalry to recreate the extinct animals was very interesting and definitely intertwined with the group, but sometimes it was slightly, er, tangential. I don't know how many pages she devoted to that one story, but the main plot was left by the wayside for a while and by the time she returned to it I couldn't remember why she'd introduced those characters in the first place. 


She introduced some of the Guests well, but I feel that sometimes I had no perspective. She might have introduced about ten of the guests, but if, as the back cover announces, they "managed to save over three hundred people from the Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty animal cages," I would like to know a more of these people. I would have appreciated a scene where she (or even Rys) went into the animal houses and brought food to the refugees and remembered them as the bald guy, or the guy who always wore black, or the lady with the twins, and too many others to count, I think I would get a slightly better sense of the sheer magnitude of this operation. Granted, mentioning five or six more people will not communicate effectively "three hundred human beings fleeing from unimaginable cruelty," but at least I won't think of it as about the size of an average family reunion. 


I enjoyed the scenes with the animals (although they all seemed to /die/ in the end . . . whether by bombing or being shot by a German soldier in a cruel joke or by getting drunk). It was kind of nice and innocent, but it seemed slightly out of place in a Holocaust novel. The big cats being shot because they just /might/ get out and menace the population of Warsaw was excessive, but it seems like it was portrayed with more horror than the Nazi camps. I feel like if the entire Aryan superiority thing could be explained, they could spare a word or two about something that happened in a death camp. Maybe she could have even described a snippet of what Jan's POW camp was like--or, if she didn't know that, what it could have been like, based upon other accounts of POW camps. What might have happened to those two girls who jumped off the train and escaped into a field. Some horrors were described, and I hope I'm not morbid, but it wasn't enough for me. The Polish soldiers shot the elephant AS HARD AS THEY COULD FOR NO REASON AT ALL. (I'm kidding. They had a reason; though it wasn't very valid in my opinion, it was still a reason. I was trying too hard to include an inside joke but it really doesn't work.) But in all seriousness, the Germans took people and pretty much shot them (and all the other ways they killed them) as hard as they could for no reason at all. Again, as in the Polish soldiers' case, they had a reason. They had a Philosophy. Aryan superiority and purification of the human race was not a good reason for this massacre (as we well know). The risk of a loose and potentially dangerous animal roaming about a city in wartime was a better reason. And in the Poles' case, their victim was an elephant and an animal, not a person. 


I had another minor comment on this edition; I don't think the pictures should have been added in the middle of the book. I looked through them halfway through reading the book (as I came to them, that is) and didn't know who Teresa was. I also didn't know that Jan got sent to a POW camp. Yes, these are spoilers which could have been avoided if I had self control. But that's all right.




Stars:  7, mainly because I couldn't handle the genre switching (but there were other reasons--see above).  


Violence:  8-9.  Well, it's the Holocaust.  There were a few brief descriptions of animals being wounded by bombs or guns and . . . well, there wasn't much human cruelty in there, although one lady is tortured and her feet are broken.  


Romance:   1; it was pretty minimal.  Just a few couples mentioned.  And the protagonist is married.  


Language:  0, unless there's something I didn't catch.  


Appropriate for:  Older teens/adults (as I don't suspect it will be popular among younger children)