Reviews with content warning for Mental illness - Slaughterhouse-Five

This book has been sitting on my shelf for a year before I had enough courage to read it. I'm glad I have waited this long because I didn't have sufficient emotional resiliency back then. This book would have swallowed me whole and spit me back in pieces. Thanks to my book friends in Just Another Chapter book club for being there to help me process what I had just read.

I love it because it's masterfully written with the emphasis on needlessness of war, and its debilitating effects. One of the most haunting lines in the books is "So it goes", an acerbic refrain that comes up every time someone dies or when the author talks about death in the book.

"there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds."

"So it goes."

"You know - we've had to imagine the war here, and we have imagined that it was being caught by aging men like ourselves. We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw these freshly shaved faces, it was a shock." 'My God, my God - - 'I said to myself, It's the Children's Crusade."

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tatiannaskye's review

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adventurous challenging reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

All along I thought this book was anti-war and such. But it is so much more than that, I mean the lessons it conveys are out of this world (see what I did there). This book could be interpreted in many ways for me I interpreted it as Billy Pilgrim has a strong case of ptsd or ptss (whichever one prefers). How no matter where he is or what he is doing in the present he is always in the past in Dresden. And that one never really leaves war after being in it and seeing it’s horrors and experiencing them too. Also the plane crash is another contributing factor to why he thinks the way he does and such. Maybe when he was in the accident his brain got all jumbled up and he took the books he’s read by Kilgore and made them into reality his reality. All in all it was a wonderful book and just an experience in and of itself reading this book. Can’t wait to read more books by vonnegut and hope they are just as wonderful.

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