"This book is set in the summer of 1876 in San Francisco and takes as its subject the unsolved murder of Jenny Bonnet, a notorious and eccentric frog-catcher who wears men's suits, and rides a stolen big-wheel bicycle. As a character, Jenny is somehow fundamental--an irreverent, freewheeling, unknowable woman. I feel I've met her before. This is a blistering, heart-wrenching read, and I devoured it in two days."
Publisher Little, Brown and Company
Publication Date 2014-04-01
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Rachel S.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780316324687
From the author of the worldwide bestseller Room: "Her greatest achievement yet...Emma Donoghue shows more than range with FROG MUSIC--she shows genius." -- Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life
Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead.
The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny's murderer to justice--if he doesn't track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers, and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women, and damaged children. It's the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts.
In thrilling, cinematic style, FROG MUSIC digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue's lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boomtown like no other.
