Recently arrived from France, she’s so successful in the flesh trade that she’s already bought her own apartment building. While “Room” held us with the precision of its cloistered voice, “Frog Music” entrances us with Blanche Beunon, a spirited prostitute whose life is about to be completely upended. Using contemporaneous newspaper articles about Jenny Bonnet, Donoghue has created a full-throated murder mystery, spiced with song and forbidden love. Donoghue notes that a journalist saw this description of the novel on Wikipedia and alerted her that someone must be playing a prank. Her story is based on the real-life shooting of a cocky cross-dresser who supported herself by supplying restaurants with frog legs. This is Victorian London with earthquakes and good Chinese food. The legal age for prostitution is 10, but that’s better than what goes on in the “schools” for delinquent children or on the flourishing baby market.

Health officials have only tenuous control over a raging smallpox epidemic. Donoghue has the whole rambunctious city swarming through this book. The shaky city is aflame with crime, disease and racial violence, fueled by grotesque extremes of wealth and poverty. “ Frog Music” - her first historical novel set in America - takes us to San Francisco in the broiling summer of 1876. The millions of readers who know Donoghue only from the harrowing tale of that little boy will discover in “Frog Music” just how expansive and boisterous this Irish Canadian author can be.

Emma Donoghue has broken out of her “Room.” Four years after that bestselling story of a mother and child imprisoned in a garden shed, she’s back with a novel ravenous for space, for people, for sounds - for all the life that 5-year-old Jack never had.

Frog music book review