Since arriving from France with her lover Arthur and his best friend Earnest she has been living the American Dream; having established herself as a high-class exotic dancer with an exclusive clientele of michetons who pay handsomely for her services, she is now the proud owner of a five-story building in the heart of Chinatown and earns more than enough to support Arthur and Earnest in the manner to which they have become accustomed.
Then she is run down in the street by a young woman called Jenny Bonnet, (a well-known drifter notorious for dressing in men's clothes, picking fights and supplying the local restaurants with the best quality frogs money can buy, but who becomes her friend), and her perfect life falls apart.
Within the month she has lost her home, her savings, and her job, while her new-found friend has been shot dead in front of her by a person or persons unknown.
Worst of all, her year-old son P'tit, whom she has just rescued from a squalid ''baby farm'', is still with his father.
Convinced Arthur and Earnest are responsible for Jenny's murder and fearing for P'tit's life, she embarks on a desperate mission to find her baby and escape before they can kill her too.
Author Emma Donoghue is not afraid to tackle difficult and disturbing issues, and is probably best known for her Booker-shortlisted seventh novel Room, the story of a young boy raised in a basement prison by his kidnapped mother and inspired in part by the case of Josef Fritzl.
The events and characters in Frog Music are also based on real life, and Donoghue (a literary historian by training) has stayed as true to the historical record as possible, reconstructing the story from the fragmentary details that remain.
While admirable scholarship, this approach imposes certain limits on what can be presented.
Although Jenny is the most interesting character in the novel (and, I think, the real focus of the author's interest), Blanche is its central character, presumably because of a paucity of information on Bonnet herself.
What little we learn about Jenny is filtered through the lens of Blanche's own life and herein lies my biggest problem with the story; the feminist in me struggled with her refusal to see how she is being used by the men in her life and the way she constantly blames herself for the abuse to which they subject her, whilst as a mother I could scarcely read some of the sections concerning P'tit because of their heartbreaking details of neglect and fear.
Of course, we shouldn't turn away from historical realities just because we find them distressing, and Donoghue has worked hard to simultaneously entertain and reveal the horrific situation that many women, children and ethnic minorities were faced with at the time, something that she does most convincingly.
Like Room, Frog Music is also very concerned with the vulnerability of children and the difficulty of being a parent, and because I was very impressed by its predecessor I really wanted to enjoy this novel too.
Yet despite the fascinating story I found it much harder to read. I'm not quite sure why - perhaps because I have a child not much older than P'tit - but in the end it felt a bit like taking an unpleasant medicine; something that I was doing not because I wanted to but because I ought.
- Cushla McKinney is a Dunedin scientist.
