In 1870s San Francisco, in the midst of a debilitating smallpox epidemic and a rancid heat wave, a cross-dressing, frog-hunting, bicycling itinerant singer named Jenny Bonnet is murdered. In Emma ...

The second in a series of posts in which we ask writers about the cultural influences on their work. I often draw on fact to spin my fiction. But in the case of “Frog Music,” which is based on an 1876 ...

Emma Donoghue’s tales are always unexpected. “Room,” which became a phenomenal best seller, was narrated by a child held captive from birth in a soundproof cell. Her newest, “Frog Music,” is a ...

While fact-checking Current contributor Leigh Baldwin’s review of Frog Music, I happened upon author Emma Donoghue’s blog post for The New Yorker titled Inspiration Information: “Frog Music.” While ...

“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” wrote James Baldwin in “Notes of a Native Son.” Much of novelist Emma Donoghue’s literary career has involved the liberation of ...

Emma Donoghue does not equivocate about the sort of book “Frog Music” is supposed to be. It opens with the murder of Jenny Bonnet, shot through the window of a boarding house near a 19th-century San ...

This real-life unsolved murder is the basis of Emma Donoghue’s new novel, “Frog Music.” (Little, Brown and Co.). The story is told through Blanche Beunon, a burlesque dancer who is in the same room ...

It begins with a real-life, never-solved 1876 murder, that of 22-year-old (or thereabouts) Jenny (née Jeanne) Bonnet, pronounced "bone-AY," à la Française. She's shot at a railway-station ...

Leah Greenblatt is the former critic at large for movies, books, music, and theater at Entertainment Weekly. She left EW in 2023. Most of us click through news headlines and see disaster or ...