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Books

Sex and squalor in San Francisco

A review of Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music. The moral and physical depravity of this ‘roiling, simmering brew of a novel’ neither entertains nor enlightens

5 April 2014

9:00 AM

5 April 2014

9:00 AM

Frog Music Emma Donoghue

Picador, pp.531, £16.99, ISBN: 9781447249340

Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel Room, however, the setting is not present-day America but that of 1876. Blanche is travelling on a train with her new friend Jenny. She hears several loud cracks and feels something hot and wet fall on her face.

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