Frog Music
Ratings11
Average rating3.4
It is 1876, and San Francisco, the freewheeling “Paris of the West,” is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman called Jenny Bonnet is shot dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, Blanche will risk everything to bring Jenny’s murderer to justice—if he doesn’t track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women and damaged children. It’s the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts. In thrilling, cinematic style, Frog Music digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue’s lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boom town like no other. Like much of Donoghue’s acclaimed fiction, this larger-than-life story is based on real people and documents. Her prodigious gift for lighting up forgotten corners of history is on full display once again in this unforgettable novel.
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It won't make my list of favorite reads, but it was okay. The story was good, but the style was a little choppy and sometimes hard to follow. I recommend it to those who have large chunks of time to sit and read because that makes it a little easier to follow the plot.
Be prepared. Donoghue is going to take you into the real world of misfits of the San Francisco of 1876. It isn't ruffles and lace. Before you close this book, you will frequent a tawdry burlesque, you'll retrieve your baby from a caregiver who has left tens of children to lie in their own waste, you will befriend a woman who catches frogs in the mud and muck, and you will, finally, dare to cast off your sycophant boyfriend who spends his days gambling away your hard-earned money.
It's not a pretty world. But it is, I suspect, very, very real.
