"Frog Music" by Emma Donoghue ~ Magical and Spirited!

SUMMARY :

From the author of the worldwide bestseller Room: "Her greatest achievement yet...Emma Donoghue shows more than range with FROG MUSIC—she shows genius." — Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life

Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead.

The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny's murderer to justice—if he doesn't track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers, and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women, and damaged children. It's the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts.

In thrilling, cinematic style, FROG MUSIC digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue's lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boomtown like no other.

PARTICULARS OF THE BOOK :

Published by:  Little, Brown & Co.
Pages:  416
Genre:  Fiction/Historical Fiction
Author:  Emma Donoghue
Website:  http://www.emmadonoghue.com
Purchase this book:  Amazon   or  Barnes & Noble


ABOUT THE AUTHOR :

Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, I am the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic, Henry James Professor at New York University). I attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one eye-opening year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 I earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin (unfortunately, without learning to actually speak French). I moved to England, and in 1997 received my PhD (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. From the age of 23, I have earned my living as a writer, and have been lucky enough to never have an ‘honest job’ since I was sacked after a single summer month as a chambermaid. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 I settled in London, Ontario, where I live with Chris Roulston and our son Finn (10) and daughter Una (6).

a bit more about Ms Donoghue:

Although I work in many genres, I am best known for my fiction, which has been translated into over forty languages.
My latest novel, Frog Music (2014), is a multi-faceted murder mystery set in San Francisco in 1876.
Room (2010) is narrated by a five-year-old called Jack, who lives in a single room with his Ma and has never been outside. An international bestseller, Room was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prize, and won the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Prize (Canada & Carribbean Region), the Canadian Booksellers’ Association Libris Awards (Fiction Book and Author of the Year), the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award and the W.H. Smith Paperback of the Year Award.
I began by writing about contemporary Dublin before the Boom in a coming-of-age novel, Stir-fry (1994), and a tale of bereavement, Hood (1995, winner of the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Book Award, and recently republished by HarperCollins in the US), and I returned to my transformed home city with a love story that contrasts it with smalltown Ontario in Landing (2007, winner of a Golden Crown Literary Award).
I have a great love for the short story form; my stories have been published in Granta, the New Statesman, One Story, the Sunday Express, Mail on Sunday, The Lady, the Globe and Mail, as well as 30 other journals and anthologies.  They have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, RTE and CBC. Touchy Subjects (2006) is a set of nineteen contemporary stories about social taboos that moves between Ireland, Britain, France, Italy, the US and Canada.
I became a YA author by accident. Kissing the Witch (1997), my sequence of re-imagined fairytales, was published for adults in the UK but bought by Joanna Cottler Books (HarperCollins) in the US; they managed to win me a whole new 12-and-up audience, and Kissing the Witch was shortlisted for the James L. Tiptree Award. 
Perhaps inevitably, given my scholarly background and bent, I moved into historical fiction with Slammerkin (2000), a whydunnit inspired by a 1763 murder.  Slammerkin was a Main Selection of the Book of the Month Club, won the 2002 Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction, and was a finalist in the 2001 Irish Times Irish Fiction Prize. 
I followed it with a sequence of short stories about real incidents from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002), and then Life Mask (2004, a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award), which tells the startling true story of a love triangle in 1790s London. The Sealed Letter (US/Canada 2008, UK 2011) is a domestic thriller about an 1860s cause celebre (the Codrington Divorce), joint winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Three and a Half Deaths, my first mini ebook (UK/Ireland only), brings together four stories of calamities ranging from 1840s Canada to 1920s France. And  Astray (2012, shortlisted for the Eason Irish Novel of the Year) is a sequence of fourteen fact-inspired stories about travels to, from and within North America; one of them, ‘The Hunt’, was a finalist in the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Prize, the world’s most valuable award for a single story.


THE BOOKISH DAME REVIEWS :

Naturally, I'm a huge fan of Ms Donoghue after having read "Slammerkin" and "Room," but even I was caught off guard by this strange sounding book with an odd plot...  I need not  have been.  "Frog Music" is just as engaging and challenging as her other books.  I absolutely loved it. 

There's a sort of "Deadwood" (if you remember the TV program from some years ago) quality about this book.  It's dark and it's filled with singular characters that lift off the pages like illuminated glyphs.  The characters are small miracles from the mind of Donoghue.  Exacting in detail, beautifully rendered, they speak with perfect pitch their roles in this vignette of the old west and settling of a still wild San Francisco in the 1800's. 

Blanche, the central figure, is a sympathetic, baudy-house lady with a pretty little Frenchman lover and his fellow who depend upon her, a sickly baby who wrenches her heart and a friendship with Jenny, a gal who wears pants and totes a gun in a time when it's against the law for women.  The mystery of who shot and killed Jenny carries the plot of the story, but it's the surrounding details that really make this book sing.

Emma Donoghue is a genius at making her stories come alive in the details.  We can sense the tension, feel the fear, joy and love of the characters, hear what they hear, and see what they see.   The songs of the era shared in the book are lilting and eerie, lending another element to support this petite, masquerade of characters.

This is a book that picks you up gently at the beginning and before you know it you're hooked.  It's the kind of book that's difficult to describe.  One where the writing tends to outshine the summary.  You know the type...

I highly recommend it.

5 stars                                   Deborah/TheBookishDame

Marie Antoinette~Reflections,Interior Design,&Stitching

Dear Marie Antoinette is a female archetypal figure to me. She's not just a Queen of France and a wildly interesting woman of history on her own count. She epitomizes the lot of women...she is symbolic Woman. I can never get enough information about her.

Let's look at the portrait above as art historians. The portrait is painted as if writing us a love letter. Marie Antoinette is only 14 years old. The very first thing we notice is her eyes. The artist has left alot of "white space" around them to make sure they draw our attention. "The eyes are the windows of the soul." Her eyes say that she is sweet and innocent, but strong-minded and ready for the task at hand. The portrait is telling us this young girl has royal blood and great potential as a royal wife. That is; after all, her only value in her Time. The laurel of pearls that softly "crowns" her hair suggests this. She is intelligent as shown by her high forehead and slightly raised brow.

We see that she is pretty and healthy by her red, bowed lips, pink cheeks and fine bosom. The artist, again, has suggested that she is precocious, or will be wise beyond her years by her over all expression and her slightly powdered wig. But, then, he doesn't want to say she's too old...so we have the big, girlish blue silk bow at her neck and chest area. And, the use of the yellow silk dress which indicates royalty and youth, purity and lightheartedness. Aside from the laurel of faintly indicated pearls in her hair, she is wearing no jewelry or other ornamentation. All in all....a very sweet portrait of a young princess to be sent to a future husband for the bargaining!! Or bluntly stated, in a more contemporary way....look at the picture closely. She is shaped like a Queen Bee in her hive....ready to reproduce! She's slightly voluptuous with a beehive hair style.

One of the very first books I ever read was a biography of her. I was smitten from that first historical encounter. I was 8 years old. Marie Antoinette seemed to be a young, kind, sadly alone girl who was a princess, but never really was understood or loved by her people. I first imagined her in my mind all alone being driven across a cold and snowy country in a covered sled headed to a strange land. I could see her bundled up in white fur and blue velvet robes. She was sent away from her home, her mother and siblings. She wasn't sure who would take her in on the other side. She didn't know who would meet her. She didn't know if her future husband would like her. She had no idea what France was, who the French people were and what her home would be like. That was the long and short of it in my child's mind. I had alot to relate to in Marie Antoinette's life. I wanted to love her then...and I still do. I have, as I said, all of my life.

So, I've decided to devote some of my blog to the study of Marie Antoinette, portraits of her, and her domestic interiors. I'm going to focus on studies of her furnishings, the colors, and the fabrics and tapestries of her surroundings. We'll get to know what she personally liked. What colors she preferred and what designs expressed who she was. We'll be able to understand more about her..not only in her palaces, but in her favorite, little rustic village and cottages. Her preferences set the historical face of interior design...and we still live with her choices today.

Our houses tell more about us than we realize. I know....I've been studying and working with arts and fabrics and furnishings in one way or another since I was a baby! What we choose, how we envelope ourselves...it all tells a story. I want to unravel Marie Antoinette's.

This is fair warning! :) I hope I don't drive some of my stitching friends away!

How will this study connect with our stitching? I want to see and stitch with some of the "colors of Marie Antoinette." I will be choosing colors from threads that are available to us now, so I can have a visual, tangible color palette. I'm thinking of designing a spot or band sampler as I go along.

Here is a beginning example. This is a bedroom drapery and silk bed covering ensemble that was made for MA for Fountainbleu. She never used the room. What it tells us is her color and pattern preferences.

Since no one would dare give her a complete bedroom that would displease her, we can be assured these are some of her favorite colors. In this picture we see that she does not use the darkest or deepest shade of colors...she liked medium tone colors. She doesn't have any pastels here, either. The pastels were kept for her cottages.

I see these 3 main colors: Grass green, peony pink, and yellow. From these you take the different values or shades of each color. There would have been 2 more secondary colors to balance the palette.... The gold acts as a "yellow."

The Chinese image above her bed shows her evolving artistic interest in chinoiserie. Trade with China brought many beautiful china and silks to royals. Marie Antoinette collected Chinese porcelain vases, for instance. By the time she has this bedroom created for her, she is well into her role as the reigning Queen of France.

However, to begin at the beginning: in the portrait at the top, Marie Antoinette of Austria is 14 yrs old. She is one year away from leaving her mother and family to become the wife and Queen of the future King of France. All she knows is music, dance, singing, embroidery, playing with her sisters, opulence, servants, structure of her mother's hard Hapsburg rule, flowers and language studies. She is an obedient child. She is the youngest daughter, and very close to her older sister who dotes on her. Her mother is a daunting and powerful woman...a Hapsburg... Ruler of a Royal Dynasty of Royals...a Queen to be respected...a strong and mostly distant mother. Marie Antonia speaks German. French is not her mother-tongue, nor is she well-schooled in French manners or world history. She is shy and willing to obey.

Here she is a young Queen. More about this portrait later.