![]() ![]() ![]() The result, if not strong enough to survive a grand jury, is a fascinating tale that touches on 19th Century gender dynamics that still exist in a more subtle form today.Īt death, Jenny’s companion is Adele Louis “Blanche” Beunon, a 24-year-old French woman who makes a living as a dancer and a prostitute for relatively “high-end” johns-or michetons. In the afterword, Donoghue details her meticulous research into the actual events, explaining that she offers only “an educated hunch, which is to say, a fiction” as to who pulled the trigger and why. The heatwave is the hottest on record, one that has transformed the city’s air into “a stinking miasma of all the steams and soots San Franciscans can produce.” Simultaneously, smallpox has infiltrated the town, dotting the city with yellow “warning” flags and ultimately killing at least 482 residents over the next year.Īmidst these conditions, Jeanne “Jenny” Bonnet, a 27-year-old frog catcher, died almost instantly from gunshot wounds.* It’s a real-life unsolved murder, one that Emma Donoghue resolves more than a century later through fiction in Frog Music. Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music is an engrossing novel based on real-life events that took place during the summer of 1876 in sweltering San Francisco. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |