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Resumen
Resumen
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.
Reseñas (5)
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
Donoghue's first literary crime novel is a departure from her bestselling Room, but it's just as dark and just as gripping as the latter. Based on the circumstances surrounding the grizzly real-life murder of Jenny Bonnet, a law-flouting, pants-wearing frog catcher who lived in San Francisco in the mid-1870s, this investigation into who pulled the trigger is told in episodic flashbacks from the point of view of Blanche Beunon. Blanche is a raunchy, self-absorbed burlesque dancer and French emigre who befriended the alluring Bonnet and was with her on the night she was killed. Also woven into the plot is Blanche's sordid relationship with Albert Deneve, an ex-tightrope walker, and his minion Ernest, who may have had a hand in the murder while swindling Blanche out of house, home, and one-year-old baby. Aside from the obvious whodunit factor, the book is filled with period song lyrics and other historic details, expertly researched and flushed out. The sweltering heat wave and smallpox epidemic that afflicted thousands in 1876, the Sinophobic takedown of Chinese businesses, and the proliferation of baby farms-glorified dumping grounds for unwanted babies-are all integrated into the story of Bonnet's tragic end. Donoghue's signature talent for setting tone and mood elevates the book from common cliffhanger to a true chef d'oeuvre. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In the sweltering fall of 1876, a San Francisco prostitute tracks a killer and searches for her stolen baby. Donoghue returns here to the historical fiction genre in which she first made her international mark (Slammerkin, 2000, etc.), but she's blended in the suspense craft she acquired writing her contemporary mega-seller Room (2010). Who fired the shotgun blasts that blew away Jenny Bonnet while her friend Blanche bent down to take off her boots? Blanche believes it was her lover Arthur or his sidekick, Ernest, who have been living on her earnings as a high-priced erotic dancer/whore. They weren't happy when Jenny goaded Blanche into retrieving her 1-year-old son, P'tit, from the ghastly holding pen for unwanted children where Arthur dumped him while Blanche was ill. And Jenny is killed while Blanche is hiding out in the countryside with her after an ugly scene with Arthur and Ernest that led Blanche to flee their apartment without P'tit. The men blame Jenny for Blanche's newfound, unwelcome independence, but there are plenty of other people in San Francisco who dislike the defiant, cross-dressing frog-catcher, who presents herself as an untamed free spirit. There's far more to Jenny's story, we learn, as Donoghue cuts between Blanche's hunt for her son in mid-September and the events of August, when her collision with bicycle-riding Jenny led to their unlikely friendship. By the time the murderer is revealed, we understand why Jenny knows so much about abandoned children, and we've seen how Blanche has been changed by her hesitant commitment to motherhood. (Some of the book's funniest, most touching moments depict her early struggles to care for "this terrible visitor," her baby.) Donoghue's vivid rendering of Gilded Age San Francisco is notable for her atmospheric use of popular songs and slang in Blanche's native French, but the book's emotional punch comes from its portrait of a woman growing into self-respect as she takes responsibility for the infant life she's created. More fine work from one of popular fiction's most talented practitioners.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
*Starred Review* Donoghue flawlessly combines literary eloquence and vigorous plotting in her first full-fledged mystery, a work as original and multifaceted as its young murder victim. During the scorching summer of 1876, Jenny Bonnet, an enigmatic cross-dressing bicyclist who traps frogs for San Francisco's restaurants, meets her death in a railroad saloon on the city's outskirts. Exotic dancer Blanche Beunon, a French immigrant living in Chinatown, thinks she knows who shot her friend and why, but has no leverage to prove it and doesn't know if she herself was the intended target. A compulsive pleasure-seeker estranged from her fancy man, Blanche searches desperately for her missing son while pursuing justice for Jenny, but finds her two goals sit in conflict. In language spiced with musical interludes and raunchy French slang, Donoghue brings to teeming life the nasty, naughty side of this ethnically diverse metropolis, with its brothels, gaming halls, smallpox-infested boardinghouses, and rampant child abuse. Most of her seedy, damaged characters really lived, and she not only posits a clever solution to a historical crime that was never adequately solved but also crafts around Blanche and Jenny an engrossing and suspenseful tale about moral growth, unlikely friendship, and breaking free from the past.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2014 Booklist
Reseña de New York Review of Books
EMMA DONOGHUE'S NOVEL "Room," published in 2010, was rightly celebrated for its terse depiction of love in a dark place. Narrated by a small boy, it's a claustrophobic and sparsely furnished exercise in horror and redemption. A mother and her young son, held captive for years in a locked room, do not go mad and destroy each other. Instead they make a sort of world, a private civilization of tenderness and warmth, population two. The novel is a triumph of the obsessed imagination thriving on a real paucity of resources. The same cannot be said of Donoghue's new novel, "Frog Music," which is based on a true-life unsolved murder that occurred on the outskirts of San Francisco in the summer of 1876. On the night in question, two women were staying in a rented room at a saloon in a place called San Miguel Station. One was a cross-dresser called Jenny Bonnet, who lived off the proceeds of the frogs' legs she sold to restaurants in the city. The other, Blanche Beunon, survived largely from the proceeds of prostitution. Blanche cohabited with a former trapeze artist named Arthur Deneve and his old circus partner, Ernest Girard. All were French. San Francisco was wilting under a heat wave so intense that horses were dying in the street. There was also an outbreak of smallpox, and growing tension between the whites and the Chinese in the city. Despite these various exotic ingredients, "Frog Music" refuses to come to life, quietly collapsing under the weight of its own tedium. This may be a function both of the thinness of the actual story on which it's based and of Donoghue's failure to develop it. When the murder occurs, Blanche is on the edge of her bed in the shabby room. As she bends down to unlace her gaiters, shots ring out, a window shatters and Jenny falls dead to the floor. Blanche was presumably the intended victim. To complicate matters, Blanche's baby, a sickly and unprepossessing infant called simply "P'tit," has recently disappeared. Blanche suspects Arthur, the baby's father, of having stolen him away. She also suspects Arthur of being the shooter who killed Jenny by mistake. It's hard to become imaginatively engaged with any of these characters. Sketchily drawn, their personality traits are superficial and fail to cohere. Nor are their various predicaments delineated with enough clarity or urgency to hold the reader's attention through pages of talk. The writing itself is weak and cliché-ridden. Blanche's "hackles rise," her "mouth hardens," she "chews her lip." Too often easy phrases substitute for a more earnest attempt to render character or situation with freshness and depth. There's an awful lot of grinning and guffawing, scoffing and smirking, chuckling and giggling. San Francisco emerges as marginally more interesting than its inhabitants. It swelters in the heat as the smallpox sweeps through, nearly claiming the life of the malignant Arthur, as meanwhile the liquor flows and mayhem and gaiety abound. And yet the picture of a ribald, boozy city of jolly hookers, hard-drinking con men and other lovable rascals soon grows wearying - in large part because the plot doesn't gain any traction, repetitively hitting the same two beats, the loss of the child and the unsolved murder. The reader stops caring, and all the roistering hilarity in the world can't mask the novel's lack of narrative energy. PATRICK MCGRATH is the author, most recently, of a novel, "Constance."
Library Journal Review
Clothes make the man, it's said, but don't tell that to Jenny Bonnet, the cross-dressing, frog-catching, gun-toting antiheroine of Donoghue's genre-defying new novel, set in late 1800s California. When the inimitable Jenny loses control of her high-wheel bicycle, riding smack into prostitute and exotic dancer Blanche Beunon, something extraordinary happens: Blanche discovers female friendship. Viewing her life through Jenny's lens, Blanche finds her fantasy world evaporating. Her lover Arthur Deneve, a gambler and a dandy, is nothing more than her pimp. And where, Blanche wonders, did he really take the little boy she gave birth to a year ago? Donoghue's evocative language invades the senses with the sights and smells of Chinatown, the frying food, boisterous saloons, even the sickrooms of victims of the smallpox epidemic. Readers won't quickly forget this rollicking, fast-paced novel, which is based on a true story and displays fine bits of humor with underlying themes of female autonomy and the right to own one's sexual identity. VERDICT A murder mystery, a feminist manifesto, and a human interest story, this will likely be compared to Donoghue's well-received Slammerkin, but it was her blockbuster, Room, soon to be a major motion picture, that made Donoghue a book group darling. Expect lots of requests. [See Prepub Alert, 10/4/13.]-Sally Bissell, Fort Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
