Emma Donoghue: Frog Music

Emma Donoghue's historical novel, Frog Music (Little, Brown, and Company), set in 1870's San Francisco, opens with the murder of the eccentrically modern Jenny Bonnet, a gun-slinging frog-hunter known for her bar fights and repeated arrests for cross-dressing. The book follows her relationship with Blanche la Danseuse, a prostitute who, prior to meeting Jenny, left her child at a baby-farm. Here, Victorian is not Victorian in the traditional sense of the word, and the past seems prescient. Donoghue found the San Francisco she uncovered while researching for her novel far more modern than the Dublin she grew up in a century later.

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