A man gets up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom but falls and hits his head. As he tries to figure out what happened, he is interrupted by seven different women from different centuries, all with a story to tell -- and all with murder in their hearts. I am often impatient with the story-within-a-story structure (think of I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb) but in this case, the stories were so well-written and the characters so engaging that I found myself looking forward to the next one. Donohue made the connections between the stories flow so that it all came together naturally. After reading several books that seem to be no more than very loosely linked short stories billed as novels, I was glad that this romp through American history read like one cohesive story.
I had read Donohue's first book (The Stolen Child) several years ago, and I remember thinking that it was dark and sad. This is neither - an enjoyable read.
Centuries of June by Keith Donohue (Crown Publishers, 2011)
My rating: 4 stars
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