Frog Music is stuffed full of characters, humor, drama, sex, and tragedy. It sprawls across the stage in technicolor, a stunning contrast to Donoghue’s earlier book Room, which confined her two protagonists—and her readers–to a tiny claustrophobic space for much of the story. And yet Frog Music has carved an aching and tender place in my heart, just as Room did.
Frog Music takes place in 1876 San Francisco, and is based on the true story of the murder of street denizen Jenny Bonnet, a gun-toting cross-dressing free spirit who trapped frogs to sell to area restaurants and repeatedly ran afoul of the city’s authorities by putting on trousers instead of skirts each morning. One day, Jenny was racing down the street on a stolen “Penny Farthing” (a high-wheel bike), and knocked down a gaudily-dressed call girl and burlesque dancer named Blanche Beunon; they soon became friends, and the seeds of tragedy are planted.
Blanche had recently come to the US from Paris, along with her lover Arthur, a former trapeze artist, and his obsessed pupil Ernest. The two men gambled and caroused on the money Blanche earned from her sex dances and on her back, but the three nonetheless coexisted in hedonistic oblivion until Jenny challenged Arthur’s claim that his and Blanche’s infant son was housed at a “healthy farm in the country.” Dredging up her deeply-buried maternal feelings, Blanche rushed out to find l’Petit, a deformed child, dying in an inner city “baby farm” for cast-off infants. She rescues him, only to discover she hasn’t the slightest idea how to care for a baby, much less an abused and non-responsive one. Furious at Arthur for his deception, she is ready to take the baby and herself and forge a new existence on Jenny’s prodding when the smallpox epidemic sweeping the city infects Arthur and confines the menage a’trois to their apartment with l’Petit.
Thus far, we have already gotten a powerful dose of 19th century San Francisco, where crime, racial abuse, poverty, drug addiction, prostitution, child labor, and disease are rampant and the threat of earthquake looms over all. But Donoghue’s story is just getting started, and we are soon to experience murder most foul, media run amuck, corrupt law enforcement, and a twisted legal system which boggles the mind. Donoghue successfully takes the reader back in time to the forging of Blanche and Jenny’s friendship, and then forward to Blanche’s desperate race for justice for her murdered friend, all the while filling in Jenny’s backstory and Blanche’s changing character. None of the characters in Frog Music come off smelling like roses, to be sure, but they are all the more real as a result.
Donoghue does an amazing job with this complicated true mystery, painting in all the sights, smells and sounds of the era on a vast and busy canvas, and if there are touches of melodrama that surface here and there, she is surely to be forgiven for offering us a captivating and very spicy slice of our own history.
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