Frog music, by Emma Donoghue

San Francisco in the mid-1870s was a wide-open frontier town.  This novel is based on a true unsolved homicide there although the author, in her first mystery novel, does offer a possible solution.  Blanche Benuon earns her living by performing “leg dances” in a high-end brothel in Chinatown, where she lives with her man, Arthur, and their friend, Ernest.  Arthur and the younger Ernest worked together as a trapeze act in their native France and Blanche had run off with them at the age of fifteen.  After Arthur is injured in a fall, the trio immigrate to America. The two men spend their days gambling (and usually losing) while Blanche brings in money from her dances and from going home with the customers.  In 1876, the city was experiencing an unremitting heat wave and a smallpox epidemic.  It is against this grim background that the novel’s events occur.  Blanche meets Jenny, a cross-dressing young woman who earns her living by catching frogs for the restaurant trade, when Jenny literally runs into her on her “high-wheeler” bike.  Jenny is regularly locked up for the crime of dressing against her sex, but is a cheerful, resilient, and outspoken survivor. Despite this inauspicious first meeting, the two rapidly become friends.  Jenny wonders about the picture of a baby in Blanche’s room and learns that she and Arthur have a child who is nearly one and has been sent to live “on a farm” recommended by the Madam of the brothel where Blanche works.  Jenny’s questions prompt Blanche, who has largely put her child out of her mind, to find out exactly where P’tit (for “Petite Arthur”) is living.  It is horrifying, and P’tit is a malnourished and damaged infant who she snatches up and brings home.  This sets in motion the events that will lead to Jenny’s being shot dead in a shabby rooming house outside of the young city’s limits.  Throughout the book, snatches of popular songs of the time provide another atmospheric dimension to the narrative.  The picture of a raw San Francisco full of gamblers, “bachelor” Chinese who do much of the labor in the city, whores, eccentrics, and disease is fascinating and well-drawn.  Blanche, a woman who enjoys sex, has known no other life, and is rather untroubled by her place in the menage a trois, is awakened by her brief relationship with Jenny.  An interesting and unusual story.  403 pp