PanThe Seattle Post-IntelligencerAckerman's The Zookeeper's Wife tells the inspiring story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, a Christian married couple who ran the Warsaw Zoo during the war and managed to provide shelter and safe passage for 300 Jews on the zoo's grounds … But The Zookeeper's Wife proves to be an uneven, fitfully paced work that seems to thwart expectations in many ways … Ackerman too often allows her narrative focus to divert from the Zabinskis and their dramatic lives. She instead provides big-picture re-creations of the well-known horrors of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw as well as narrative side trips on subjects that interest her, such as Nazi attempts to ‘re-create’ several species of extinct animals through a process of ‘back-breeding.’
