Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Review: Frog Music

Frog Music
By Emma Donoghue
Little, Brown, and Company April 2014
403 pages
From the library

Frog Music

San Francisco in 1876 is a difficult place to live. The heat is unbearable and smallpox is rampant. Blanche Beunon is a burlesque dancer from France who lives with her boyfriend and his best friend. She has no friends of her own though, until she meets the fascinating and enigmatic Jenny Bonnet. Jenny makes her living catching frogs and selling them to local restaurants but she is notorious for wearing men's clothing. Jenny and Blanche become close, but their growing friendship is cut short when Jenny is murdered before Blanche's eyes. She sets out to discover who murdered Jenny. Her search will uncover Jenny's true past and determine Blanche's future. 

Frog Music is based on a true case and Jenny and Blanche were both real people. While Donoghue's suppositions about what really happened are fascinating, the true wonder is the way she brings a specific time and place to vivid life. You can practically smell the Chinese food cooking in the area of town where Blanche lives and hear the French songs that she loves to sing. This book covers so much of the darkness of humanity - the way Jenny is persecuted for the way she dresses, the impossibility of escaping a life of prostitution, the terrible living conditions of people crammed into tiny apartments, and the horrendous but all-too-real practice of 'baby farms' where parents paid for their children to be barely kept alive in huge institutions. This book is not easy to read, but it is always engaging. 

Blanche is smart and savvy - she knows which 'clients' to keep on her good side and has even managed to save enough money to buy the building in which she lives. The rent from the other tenants in addition to her work as a dancer/prostitute keep her living comfortably. But Blanche is naive when it comes to people. Her boyfriend Arthur and his best friend Ernst live off of the money that she brings home. It isn't until Jenny starts asking questions about her life that Blanche learns that she cannot always trust the people around her. This makes Blanche a frustrating character at times but she is, after all, only 25 years old. How many of us are content to call our lives good until our eyes are opened to something more?

Emma Donoghue is a powerful writer. Her novel Room catapulted her to literary stardom with its tale of a boy and his mother held captive. In Frog Music, Donoghue can stretch her narrative horizons and introduce a dazzling and dangerous city and characters who can charm you while their dangerous secrets loom over them. This book can be hard to stomach as it chronicles the basest of human instincts to survive at any cost and to conquer the weak, but it makes the reader uncomfortable only because Donoghue reveals them with an unflinching eye for character and story. 


A note: Some other reviewers were taken aback at the explicit nature of some scenes in this book. Blanche does work as a dancer and prostitute and the author describes both her professional and personal sex life. 

6 comments:

  1. I keep debating about this book...but I hear more good than bad about it. And it's such an intriguing story. I like the time period. And the mystery. Maybe I'll look for it next library trip. :)

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    1. It's difficult to read because there is so much human cruelty that is right in your face. Interestingly, when I looked at some of the negative reviews on Goodreads, it seemed to be more about the content of the story (prostitution etc) than about the style or story itself.

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  2. Great review! I also enjoyed Frog Music both for the impressive writing and the meticulous research underlying the novel. However, I did take issue with the way Donoghue portrays Blanche's thirst for sex and her life of prostitution. She is a john-centric fantasy. As I wrote in my review (May 19, 2014):

    "To the extent Donoghue provides hints that Blanche’s enthusiasm for prostitution is more show than reality, it’s minimal and focused more on criticizing her mac (pimp) and madam than on criticizing the michetons or the circumstances that could force a woman into it. I would have appreciated a more nuanced analysis of whether Blanche’s “chosen” employment is really a free choice based on an insatiable desire for sexual pleasure or if her claims of “desire” are, at best, an attempt to cope with her circumstances."

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    1. I see your point. I felt like Donoghue was trying to create a woman who enjoys sex (how novel, right?) but then she didn't fully develop it so we ended up with a half-baked concept and characterization.

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  3. Can't wait to read this one! I've enjoyed ROOM and Kissing the Witch. She just has such wonderful breadth to her writing and topics.

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