Book Review: Blood Ivory by Grace Ge Gabriel

 

Another ARC. Let's take a look!

In this book, Chinese-American wildlife conservationist Grace Ge Gabriel joins the IFAW NGO and tries to fight many battles, mainly in China, against the illegal wildlife trade. Specifically tigers, bears and elephants are often the subject of her struggles. Ge Gabriel tells her story here, from conservation losses to wins.

Overall I quite enjoyed this book. While it is a bit on the lengthier side and can feel slow-paced at points, I never really lost interest and kept wanting to read on and on as we got further and further into Ge Gabriel's efforts to put an end to wildlife/wildlife part trafficking.  

I really appreciate the efforts and her and her IFAW colleagues, being a huge fan of animals and nature in general. Thankfully the book ends on a pretty positive note, but there are also quite a few sad moments in this. And sadly, even if there have been wins for the wildlife, the laws regarding trading of their parts also aren't stagnant and can change for the worse. And illegal trafficking is also still a thing, of course.

I found Ge Gabriel's writing style to be enjoyable and easy to read. However, if I do have to pick a flaw, it's that my ARC provided by Netgalley for my Kindle was chock-full of typos, formatting errors and missing letters in words. Not sure if this is a file conversion gone wrong or something else, but it was very distracting and did hamper my enjoyment of the book a bit. 

I don't think that this'll be present in the final product, but I do have to knock off a point of my rating for this very very flawed Kindle file I was given. Even if Ge Gabriel's writing itself was fine, the constant errors in the text made this book quite tiring to read, because the mind constantly has to focus and correct the typos. 

Still, if you overlook the many typos, this was a good and enjoyable read. I applaud Grace and everyone like her who fights for wildlife and nature in general.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for my honest opinion. 

Rating: 3.5/5