The Truth about Celia

by Kevin Brockmeier

Book Overview

While playing alone in her backyard one afternoon, seven-year-old Celia suddenly disappears while her father Christopher is inside giving a tour of their historic house and her mother Janet is at an... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375421351
• ISBN13: 9780375421358
• Release Date: July 2003
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Well Done!

The Truth About Celia pulled me away from chores and kept me up past my bedtime -- it was simply impossible to put down. Brockmeier carried me into the mystical land of grief and explored what is beyond the edge of the mind. Best of all, he accomplished this with a careful collection of beautiful words. I'll read this one again and again, and I've already ordered a copy to loan to friends. Well done Mr. Brockmeier.

A poem in novel form

This novel is difficult to describe, it's almost a set of inter-related short stories. And yet, each unique chapter informs the others in such away that the whole is profoundly moving. This is one of those rare books that should be read in a short period of time if possible, because the details you retain, the connections you make, are simply amazing. The more you put into it, the more you get out of it, it's that rich. On top of that, it's just achingly beautifully written. One of the best books I read last year, I can't recommend it enough.

This book is perfection

Each piece perfect in and of itself, they fit together into something even more wonderful. One of my favorite books this year.

Deeply moving...

I cannot say that I know what it is like to lose a child, however, Kevin Brockmeier's novel engulfs the pain and heartache of a father who has lost his daughter. Brockmeier's delicate and beautifully written sentences led me to cry and laugh...and not stop reading until I finished. Wonderful book.

A Bare Reacting Heart

No book published this year has moved me as deeply as The Truth About Celia. Neither have I read another book so greedily, staying up well into the night until, as Brockmeier himself writes, I became "nothing but a pair of eyes and a bare reacting heart." Kevin Brockmeier is a writer with perfect pitch. His instincts are unerring and his sentences unfold beautifully, with a precision I haven't experienced since A River Runs Through It or Brad Watson's Last Days of the Dog Men. Even at its most unorthodox (particularly in a section entitled "Faces, and How They Look from Behind," in which point-of-view shifts rapidly from person to person, like a baton in a relay race), Brockmeier never sounds a false note. Similarly, the short fantasy pieces interposed throughout the text (Christopher, Celia's father, is a writer of fantasy and science fiction) enhance rather than obscure the narrative, effectively serving as an outlet for Christopher's anguish after his daughter's disappearance -- a way, however temporary, of inhabiting a world in which his child is not lost to him. Brockmeier has already amassed a variety of awards for his short fiction, including a first-place O. Henry prize and inclusion in The Best American Short Stories anthology. If there is any justice in the book world, The Truth About Celia will pick up at least one of the major American literary awards next year and bring Kevin Brockmeier the wider audience he deserves.