Here she supports her former circus aerialist consort Arthur and his acrobat pal Ernest - and now and then gives them both sexual succor in boldly described early morning acrobatics. Blanche has cobbled together her earnings from the dance hall and prostitution so she can buy a small building in Chinatown. She supplies the other frog music in the novel, the charming songs she sings while putting on her erotic shows, mostly at Madame Johanna's House of Mirrors. So now here's Blanche, also picking herself up off the street. Some bumpy 'meet cute,' as they say in the movies. Smallpox be damned: nobody's staying in tonight.' She accidentally knocks down a French danseuse (famous for her 'leg dance' on local stages) named Blanche Beunon, not yet in her mid-twenties, and the mother of an undernourished waif.

'Drinkers shuffle arm in arm from bar to bar, bawling dirty choruses knots of men head for the bordels on Commercial or Pacific. She's a pistol-packing, pants-wearing gal in a town where pants on women are one of the few cardinal sins, and she scratches out a living catching frogs and selling them to local restaurants.Īs the book opens, Jenny comes rolling along a busy San Francisco street on a stolen bicycle.

There's real frog music in these pages, the riveting cries of the creatures hunted by Jenny Bonnet, one of the two main characters. San Francisco in the summer of the 1876, between the Gold Rush and the smallpox epidemic, is the setting for Emma Donoghue's boisterous new novel, Frog Music. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Frog Music Author Emma Donoghue

Frog music book review