Rainy Day Reads

I picked this book up because I thought the premise sounded interesting. It tells the tale of the Warszava Zoo and how it was used as a hideout for Jews and resistance members during the Second World War. It is based on a true story and mainly gets its details from the diary of the director’s wife, who chronicled her life and work during the years of the occupation.  I was under the impression that this would be a fictionalized account based on the facts in the diary, but I soon discovered that it was actually more of a retelling of the events in the diary interspersed with facts and stories from other sources. I had looked forward to a retelling of an interesting, personal story from the war, as I always find these kinds of stories interesting, but instead I essentially ended up reading a non-fiction book. I kept waiting for the story to shift into “fiction-gear” but it never happened. Once I resigned myself to that fact, the story was still interesting, but I did no...