Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel Room, however, the setting is not present-day America but that of 1876. Blanche is travelling on a train with her new friend Jenny. She hears several loud cracks and feels something hot and wet fall on her face. When she collects her senses, Jenny lies dead.
Like Kate Atkinson, Donoghue straddles the literary and the crime genre. Room, inspired by the discovery of a number of women abducted and impregnated by their captors, should have won the 2010 Orange Prize and didn’t — perhaps because its subject matter was simply too controversial. Frog Music, like Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter, is a return to a historical setting.
Blanche is a ‘soiled dove’, a bohemian Frenchwoman who does exotic dances in a nightclub.
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