"I don't understand why you would write a book about a zookeeper who helped the Polish underground against the nazis and be so tone deaf and boring about it.

There's a lot of underconfident writing on display here. The writer tells us upfront what her sources are for writing about the Zabinskis just so we know she's not making stuff up, then every time she has one of her characters think or feel something that she got from her research, she puts quote marks around it to legitimise it so again, we know she's not just making it up. She should be able to trust her audience to have some faith in her that she knows enough about her subject to not have to prove it constantly.

The bigger issue for me is that she's obviously not comfortable talking about the realities of war; every time she brings up something negative like the ghetto or the nazis exterminating Jewish people, she just gets it out of the way as quickly and dryly as she can so she can spend 3 pages waxing lyrical about some guy's beautiful bug collection for example. She spends pages and pages telling us about how this one nazi loves animals and how being in war can foster an intense sense of community or how there was a clown and beautiful street names in the ghetto, then there's maybe a brief paragraph about this soldier hunting Jewish children.

I get the urge to want to show there's beauty in all things, but when you treat the war and the treatment of Jewish people like an inconvenient down side to your REAL story, then maybe don't write about WW2 era Poland??

I got halfway through this and left it at a bar for soneone who might like it more. Blehh."