Reclaiming the Queer Past with Frog Music

After her hetero, contemporary, Booker-nominated, international smash Room, in her eighth novel Emma Donoghue once again revisits queer historical lives, this time in San Francisco in 1876. Misfits and outsiders of every sexual stripe collide in Chinatown amid a smallpox outbreak and relentless heatwave in Frog Music [Kindle], based on an actual unsolved murder. The sophisticated mystery unwinds forward and backwards around Blanche Beunon, a former circus performer / current stripper / sometime whore, and a trouser-wearing frogcatcher named Jenny Bonnet who is killed on the second page by a bullet intended for Blanche. The rollicking action is peppered throughout with French songs, or, 'frog' music. Donoghue's swift plotting, Dickensian interest in parenthood, and vivid sense of place have been widely praised by critics, a few of whom quibbled with the book's dark tones or rushed lapses in writing.