Women on the Margins

If your experience of Emma Donoghue’s fiction is limited to her bestselling 2010 novel, Room, arguably her breakthrough work, then her latest, Frog Music, will not be what you expect.

Room is a tightly focused, self-contained psychological thriller, told from the point of view of five-year-old Jack, born and raised in a small room where his ma has been imprisoned for seven years. (A half-dozen people, including one of my daughters and one of my oldest friends, have told me Room was the best novel they ever read—ever. It is certainly in my top five.)

Frog Music, Donoghue’s eighth novel and 15th book, is much closer in tone and flavour to Astray, Donoghue’s 2012 collection of short stories, all based on historical incidents or characters from the fringes of society. Frog Music is a murder mystery based on an actual historical event: on September 14, 1876, notorious cross-dresser Jeanne (a.k.a. Jenny) Bonnet...