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 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 - Brockmeier must have read the same stories of the bizarre as I did as a child.
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A beautiful book, more a collection of related stories than a novel, which begins the day a 7-year old girl vanishes from her yard. This is not a novel of suspense: there are no leads in the case and Celia is never seen again. The father, a professional writer who is unable to write for several years after, is the fictional author of the book, in which he tells his own story and makes up stories from the viewpoints of his daughter, his wife, and others. Several of the tales are gentle versions of what might have happened that morning, and one is about an adult woman who can't remember her childhood before age 7. Two or three are fairy tales, almost. Yes, there's a sadness underlying the book, of course, but the stories are so compelling and the writing so gorgeous that I think most readers would count themselves lucky for having found it. ( )

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 truly happening just as the protagonist is. Borckmeier is honest and touching in his ability to write this kind of story, a delicate wonder that could easily become a stale cliché. When it seemed all words and worlds had already been explored, Brockmeier managed to transcend the limitations of already used language and make it all seem so real again.

Favorite Quotes:

pg 11 "She likes the way the joke makes a perfect ring, wrapping around on itself again and again, like a pinwheel or a revolving door, but not everyone thinks it's funny."

pg. 45 "NOTHING MAKES GOD LAUGH LIKE WHEN WE TELL HIM OUR PLANS FOR THE FUTURE"

pg. 91 "The school projector always sounded like a bicycle with a playing card pinned between the spokes, rattling softly then loudly and then softly again, and it gave the movies they watched in the classroom a stuttering sort of rhythm, a cadence of music that lay just beneath the action and came to seem inseparable from it."

pg. 106 "Janet felt an unexpected lightness inside her. There was no behavior so outlandish that it wasn't a believable human response to the world."

pg. 136 "Frank Lentini, Magician," and he headed for the front door. Just before he left, Micah took his sleeve and asked him a question: 'You're not me coming back from the future to tell me about my life, are you."

...

"No, son," he finally said. "No, I wish I was. Some tricks even a magician can't perform."

pg. 194 "...as if the words were crawling up from underneath his tongue."

pg. 207 "Sometimes he thinks that the world as we know it is as thin as a tissue of cloud-that we can pierce through it without even trying, stepping sideways out of ourselves, and end up in some other world altogether, or in no worked at all. Sometimes he thinks that the shout he heard that afternoon was the sound Celia made as the tissue closed behind her.

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"our place in the world is the narrowest possible perch - and the smallest jostle can cause us to lose our footing." what begins as a story about a father losing his daughter, under circumstances that remain mysterious as the story progresses, moves to include a wide web of people, a dash of science-fiction-like flashback, and tremendous depth and "an extraordinary exploration of profound loss and inconsolable grief." it's amazing what falls into one's hands from the library shelf, when one least expects it. ( )