The Truth About Celia

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.

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 circumstance t [...]

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 [...]

La primera parte me estaba gustando mucho pero luego perdió el sentido y perdí todoel interés.

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 [...]

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.

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.

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 [...]

The writing is beautiful. Nothing happens.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Para comenzar el autor nos situa en tiempo y espacio describiendonos su entorno, su familia, sus costumbres y un poquito de la personalidad de cada uno de los integrantes de la pequeña familia (padre, madre e hija), debo reconocer que las descripciones fueron bastante buenas. Una mañana comun y corriente, la madre se va a su clase de musica, y su padre queda ordenando su pequeña casa mientras cuidaba a su pequeña hijita Celia, como es normal en los niños pequeños en lugar de ayudar, termin [...]

2 estrellas 〓 "it's ok"Lo que me produjo este libro se le puede asignar una palabra perfecta: decepción. Si bien lo compré en una oferta y estaba super barato, me esperaba un realismo psicológico que nunca llegó, aquel que ofrecía la contratapa.Empieza bien: una chica desaparecida, padres preocupados, resultados esperados (como alteraciones sociales y cambios rutinarios), teorías refutables Pero a medida que avanzan los capítulos, el autor te lleva por diferentes escenarios adversos, al [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Kevin Brockmeier is one of the authors concerning whom I have made it my duty to read every possible published work. With this one complete, I only have one to go, and like everything else he's written, The Truth About Celia is incredible.Concerning, as a brief glance at the back cover would reveal, the disappearance of the title character when she was seven, the book chronicles the lives of her parents in the aftermath. Brockmeier utilizes an author-construct in the form of Celia's bereaved fat [...]

I was so taken with the honesty and commitment of this book that I bought it as soon as I found it in the bookstore. It delivered, in the first couple chapters, much like a dance, floating from character to character. The author managed to keep so much detail alive, that it really was a brilliant read. I am grateful for the explanation on the back that the rest of the book behaves much like a collection of stories rather than facts, or else I don't think I would have understood it.I loved all th [...]

This book was pretty good. No doubt that it was well-written. The beginning, I thought, was the best bit. He writes remarkably well. However, sometimes he seemed to get lost within his own words, saying stuff for no reason.I would have given it four stars and HIGHLY recommended it if not for one thing: *SPOILER ALERT* he never tells what happened to Celia. I understand that this was 'realistic', as most missing children are never found, but this is a novel, and I expect it to have a proper endin [...]

Parents linger over the disappearance of their daughter.***SPOILERS AHOY!*******Don't go looking for any resolution in this book. Just like in his novel A Brief History of the Dead (which I loved), Kevin Brockmeier delights in exploring the vortexes left in the world by people who've passed away. Truth About Celia seemed scattered to me until I remembered that the main character's profession was author. The scattered chapters are insights into the father's grief. The stories give the reader insi [...]

"The Truth About Celia" is an odd book, but not nearly as odd as I expected it to be. The novel, written by Kevin Brockmeier, is written as if it is the novel written by Christopher Brooks, a science fiction and fantasy author whose daughter, Celia, disappeared. The novel, then, is his way coming to grips with her disappearance, which he does through a variety of perspectives and sections that are certainly connected but also read a bit like a series of short stories. There are hints of ghosts, [...]

Beautifully painful, this book is about a 7-year-old girl going missing and, rather than the search for her, the impact of her disappearance on her parents, especially her father, and the small town they live in. Not a novel, it's an emotionally connected collection of short stories (one of which doesn't quite seem to fit) - ostensibly written by the guilt-ridden, fiction-writer father - that becomes a lyrical evocation of endless loss: the shattered father, alone in a house he can't leave, acce [...]

Goodness, I am not sure where to begin with relaying my thoughts about this book. It was an intense, unsettling story. I was initially skeptical of the author's device - the novel was written as a collection of stories authored by a fictional character about his daughter's disappearance. I grew accustomed to this pretty quickly, and I ended up not minding it. Some of the author's descriptions were overly dense; at times I just became tired of so much detail. The book really drew me in emotionall [...]

Full disclosure: I'm a major Kevin Brockmeier fan, having been completely won over by The Brief History of the Dead.This book was an exploration of grief (loss of child)and incredibly weighty. What Brockmeier does is tell the story from multiple vantage points, so that the story is layered and complex, circling around and coming back to the central story.As I approached the end of the book, though, I wanted to come to some kind of closure, and that wasn't the purpose of this book. Brockmeier see [...]

This book is interesting in that the novel is a collection of stories all by the same "author," Christopher Brooks, who is the story's main character. Christopher's daughter, Celia, disappears when she is 7, while playing in her front yard. Each chapter explores a different part of Celia's disappearance - either what may have actually happened to the family before and after the disappearance, or an explanation for Celia's disappearance through legend or magic. Each story is part of Christopher's [...]

Why isn't Kevin Brockmeier one of those authors that people praise? Too subtle? Too depressing? Too odd? I loved his "Brief History of the Dead" which I bought solely for the cover; I can't get over the concept behind that one. This is an earlier book, purportedly a collection of stories written by a man trying to deal with the disappearance of his 7 year old daughter Celia while under his care. The connected stories are about the investigation, what may have happened to her, how she may have gr [...]

Ha uno strano incedere, quasi ipnotico direi, questo libro. Un modo tutto suo di tirarti dentro, un'originalità nei toni ma anche per come affronta certi sentimenti, certi vuoti e come li descrive, qualche volta ellitticamente, a volte colpendoti forte e diretto.C'è persino lo spazio per un capitolo che è un piccolo saggio sull'essere-spettatori-al-cinema eppure ti racconta fortissimo il dolore. Perché una figlia che scompare è una voragine che non ha fondo, che non ha confini, che non ha p [...]

I picked the worst time to read this book, a book that I had no idea what the content was. I was departing to NYC for a business trip, leaving my two daughters and wife, reading a book about a seven-year-old disappearing form her yard without a trace. Joy!My only exposure to Brockmeier was a single, magical short story, and this novel has a definite short story vibe. At least two of the chapters are basically short stories within the book, and the rest of the chapters are fairly self-contained.I [...]

This is the third of Brockmeier's novels I've read, and every one of them have this atmosphere of grief and loss to them. I liked his approach to the chapters here, though I can see a lot of readers being put off by it. Each one seems to be it's own self-contained story without being sequential, and the events of one aren't necessarily picked up in another. The through-line is the dad whose daughter goes missing and the effect it has on him and his wife. The author shifts points of view and tens [...]

I instantly fell in love with this book which is lovely and compelling, and startling and eerie at the same time. It is a book-within-a-book (not easy for a writer to pull off), a collection of short stories by science fiction writer Christopher Brooks describing his failing marriage and his fantasies and delusions surrounding the disappearance of his seven year old daughter, Celia. I was especially thrilled by the short story in which he imagines Celia as one of the green children of Woolpit - [...]

wonderful book! Even though there were parts of it where I became a little confused, the author's writing kept me at it until things became clearer. I just loved the chapter where the father weaves this tale of green kids and her daughter being one of them, to explain or to cope his daughter's disappearance. It was odd though that the book was written from the dad's perspective, but I didn't feel like I knew him, but the author manages to build the character of the wife very intricately using ve [...]