Kevin Brockmeier's "The Truth About Celia" contains within it The Truth About Celia, a collection of stories by stricken father Christopher Brooks. 7-year-old Celia vanished on March 15, 1997 -- one moment she was playing in the yard, and the next she was gone. No trace, no clues, no resolution. Nothing Christopher Brooks has done since could really be described as coping -- he agonizes, he blames, he yearns, and he speculates. Was Celia kidnapped? Is Celia dead? Did Celia slip through the membr...

The writing is beautiful. Nothing happens.

Brilliant, like watching a brilliant chess match, not knowing why the rook moved there but in 5 moves it becomes apparent. Not obtuse but stimulating. Short but not a quick read for me, I was so impressed by the fragmentation of the narrative, and the subjective essence Brockmeier lends to his characters is at once thrilling. For Brockmeier, the danger of falling into a predictable "missing person" trap was parried not by means of the story itself, but rather its presentation.

I loved this book! It's a book of short stories, supposedly written by Christopher Brooks, the father of a girl who disappeared from her yard when she was seven. Brooks doesn't move on or get over his daughter's disappearance: he is haunted by it. The only way for him to keep writing, it seems, is to write stories about what might have happened to her and about his experiences as her father. I loved the portrait of the small Massachusetts town where the Brookses live, the mother's obsession with...

In a word: lovely.In another: heartbreaking.A series of short stories, written by a man (not the author; this is the frame narrative) wondering what has become of his daughter, who disappeared when she was seven years old. Some of the stories are realistic, imagining what happened that day or how the townspeople reacted or the adult Celia might have grown up to be.It's how a father struggles to hold on while a mother struggles to move past. It's different ways to deal with grief. It's the hopefu...

Basically this is a story about a 7 year-old girl who goes missing. Some chapters are from the perspective of each of the parents, some are from the POV of the (ghost?) girl, and other chapters are stories of maybe people tangentially related, or perhaps unrelated to the rest of the narrative. It's about grief of course, and sometimes in a fantastical form.

Mawkish, disjointed story about a missing child that’s held together by an unnecessary metatextual framing device, that of an imaginary author who is the missing child’s father. I appreciated the first 76 pages, particularly “The Green Children,” which was reprinted in Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. The rest of the book didn’t work for me, especially not the chapter from the perspective of the missing (presumably dead) child. A certain plot twist about a ghost child seemed clever, but with refl...

i don't know that the conceit of this book was emphatic enough, or even necessary, but i don't care, i love his writing. i could read about 400 more pages of this story - i like my imaginary-multiple-perspective-narratives loooong, baby. okay, i've decided - he should email me one story a day continuing this theme. i'm glad we are all in agreement thank you.

Kevin Brockmeier's writing makes me so happy that I am a reader. His words just sing to me and hit all the most beautiful notes. Even when he's describing the saddest thing in the world, the words sing.

A very different outline. Each chapter starts off like a new story, but it gets woven eventually. Very descriptive wording.

Very disconcerting story.

Didn't like it at all. Very hard to get into, the chapters vary from perspective, you never find out what happened to the girl. Waste of time.

Seven-year-old Celia Brooks vanishes from her Springfield backyard on a Saturday afternoon in March 1997, while her mother Janet, who plays the clarinet, is at a Community Orchestra rehearsal, and her father, a novelist named Christopher Brooks, is inside showing two visitors the family's historical home. We meet the residents of the small town going about their lives four years later, on a day that will culminate in a memorial service for Celia. In the heart of this slender book, between the di...

I was expecting to like this better than I did, having lost a close family member it's a subject that is close to home. It just didn't click at all. The section switching characters seemed to serve no purpose, it felt completely flat. I'd have cut it some slack if the language was particularly good, but the verb constructions were all very weak, it felt very flat and lifeless, which is suppose is a reflection of the grief, but I think a better writer would have found a better way of expressing t...

I'm going to go with..."haunting". This book is troubling and deliberate as it draws the reader into the nightmare created when a child disappears.This is the story of a seven year old girl who is suddenly gone, leaving her father with grief, guilt and a touch of madness. The book is presented from the perspective of the father, an author, as he imagines his Celia and the circumstances which may have surrounded her disappearance. He considers that she may be growing-up in a different circumstanc...

2.5/5 stars"I want to understand what she is thinking, in this moment just before it happens (though I do not yet know that it will happen). What is she remembering, or noticing, or imagining? What is she watching so intently? It is important to me. Watching her, I feel an enormous plummeting sensation in my legs, as if I have missed the last step on a ladder, though it may be that I feel this only in retrospect. I do not know."I picked this book up randomly when the Kindle version went on sale....

Gosh, what the hell is wrong with Keven Brockmeier? One minute he's writing classic short stories like "The Ceiling", the next minute he's writing stuff like this. I mean, this isn't a bad book, by any measure. But do we really need more disappeared child, sad parent novels? And the way the story is handled, with a mix of magical realism and extreme emotion, makes it difficult to really connect with the characters. Still, Brockmeier is a talented writer, and nothing he writes is without some kin...

I bought you doing a dark winter when I needed to read about something that was sadder than I felt. Your first 30 pages were about as much as I got through. I'm sure you're worth more than that, but I would need a reason to continue. And I hope I never have one.

In some ways Brockmeier is a bit of an enigma to me. He's writing about a topic numerous other authors have written about, the disappearance of a child but the way he writes it seems so real and engaging without any sort of pretense or phony tear jerking scenes and yet one can't help but feel so drawn in to the characters and the story, to their alternate versions of history. Some of it is more fantastical in terms of its ideas and others of it are grand hallucinations the reader believes are tr...

Devastating and dazzling; in its painful fusion of pathos, fantasy – ultimately- realism, Brockmeier’s heartbreaking book is reminiscent on The Lovely Bones” so says Time Out. I’d agree with the first bit of this assessment of Kevin Brockmeier’s book, but not with the second - this book is nothing like The Lovely Bones a book which I admired the heck out of for the first 100 pages and was then incredibly disappointed with.Other than a few rave reviews, I knew nothing about this book or its autho...