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Frog Music - Emma Donoghue
Mar. 18th, 2019 09:24 amI found Frog Music on Libby while looking for a different one of Emma Donoghue’s novels (Slammerkin) which a friend of mine had posted about on Tumblr, and the plot description caught my eye so I decided to read it anyway.
Set in mid-1870s San Francisco, Frog Music is based off the real-life unsolved murder of Jenny Bonnet, a young woman who made her living catching frogs for local restaurants and was in near-constant trouble with the law, most often for cross-dressing. The only witness was her friend Blanche, a French burlesque dancer and sex worker. The narrative is split before the development of Blanche’s friendship with Jenny over the life-changing month leading up to her murder, and its immediate aftermath. Blanche thinks she knows who killed Jenny, and why, but as the novel unfolds, she realizes just how much she didn’t know about her friend.
It was... eh, just okay, to be honest. I didn’t hate it enough to stop reading, but the more I think about it in retrospect the more upset I feel about some red flags, in terms of my ability to enjoy the book, that I ignored while actually reading it. (Remember when I complained about that Agatha Christie movie kind of hand-waving away the existence of homophobia in the early 20th century? I take it back, the opposite case is much worse.)
( If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all, or at least say it behind the cut. )
Personally, I found the atmosphere more compelling than the story itself. In the summer of 1876, San Francisco was caught between a record-breaking heat wave and a devastating smallpox epidemic, and anti-Chinese sentiment in the city, which would boil over into a massive riot the following year and eventually the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, was on the rise. Donoghue clearly did her research, and touches on many interesting – if not always pleasant – aspects of the world in which her characters live. I was especially struck by how many of the issues are still, somehow, under debate today: xenophobia, racism in entertainment (apparently blackface minstrels were a staple of 1870s San Francisco street performances?), the need to vaccinate your fricking kids. As the title suggests, music is a big theme in the novel; snippets of songs are sprinkled throughout, conveniently and/or ironically related to/symbolic of plot points, which was a cool idea but in some cases a little clumsily done. Which is my feelings about this book in a nutshell, really.
Anyway, if “murder mystery set in a mid-to-late 19th century gold rush settlement/city” piques your interest, I’d suggest reading The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton instead. It’s set in New Zealand, instead of San Francisco, and about a decade earlier, and has a very different vibe – the omniscient 19th-century-pastiche narrator lets us peek into the heads of multiple characters, and it’s a complex puzzle box of a book, with a thread of magical realism running through it – but I couldn’t help but draw the comparison.
Set in mid-1870s San Francisco, Frog Music is based off the real-life unsolved murder of Jenny Bonnet, a young woman who made her living catching frogs for local restaurants and was in near-constant trouble with the law, most often for cross-dressing. The only witness was her friend Blanche, a French burlesque dancer and sex worker. The narrative is split before the development of Blanche’s friendship with Jenny over the life-changing month leading up to her murder, and its immediate aftermath. Blanche thinks she knows who killed Jenny, and why, but as the novel unfolds, she realizes just how much she didn’t know about her friend.
It was... eh, just okay, to be honest. I didn’t hate it enough to stop reading, but the more I think about it in retrospect the more upset I feel about some red flags, in terms of my ability to enjoy the book, that I ignored while actually reading it. (Remember when I complained about that Agatha Christie movie kind of hand-waving away the existence of homophobia in the early 20th century? I take it back, the opposite case is much worse.)
( If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all, or at least say it behind the cut. )
Personally, I found the atmosphere more compelling than the story itself. In the summer of 1876, San Francisco was caught between a record-breaking heat wave and a devastating smallpox epidemic, and anti-Chinese sentiment in the city, which would boil over into a massive riot the following year and eventually the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, was on the rise. Donoghue clearly did her research, and touches on many interesting – if not always pleasant – aspects of the world in which her characters live. I was especially struck by how many of the issues are still, somehow, under debate today: xenophobia, racism in entertainment (apparently blackface minstrels were a staple of 1870s San Francisco street performances?), the need to vaccinate your fricking kids. As the title suggests, music is a big theme in the novel; snippets of songs are sprinkled throughout, conveniently and/or ironically related to/symbolic of plot points, which was a cool idea but in some cases a little clumsily done. Which is my feelings about this book in a nutshell, really.
Anyway, if “murder mystery set in a mid-to-late 19th century gold rush settlement/city” piques your interest, I’d suggest reading The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton instead. It’s set in New Zealand, instead of San Francisco, and about a decade earlier, and has a very different vibe – the omniscient 19th-century-pastiche narrator lets us peek into the heads of multiple characters, and it’s a complex puzzle box of a book, with a thread of magical realism running through it – but I couldn’t help but draw the comparison.
