A review by jdscott50
Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut

3.0

I was a little disappointed with this book as it lacks all the characteristics that readers come to expect of a Vonnegut work. Furthermore, the foreword of any work by Vonnegut was just as entertaining as the stories themselves, but this one came up short. The forewords made sense of the whole thing. I remember reading the foreword of Breakfast of Champions and reading about how soldiers fighting during World War I head the silence on the 11 day of the 11 month with the truce and swore that it was the voice of God. This is just a collection of short stories from a novice writer trying to find his voice.

Armageddon in Retrospect was the last book Vonnegut was working on before his death. In that book, I could tell that he wanted to rework certain stories within it. There are in fact two stories in that work that are identical with exception to the ending. It was a magnificent final work, Birdie is probably the worst. It probably shouldn't have been put out at all with the exception pleasing hard core Vonnegut fans. With the exception of Candido, all of the stories are very bland and predictable. They lack the characteristics of the Vonnegut everyone knows.