Readers who first became aware of Emma Donoghue via her blockbuster 2010 novel Room might imagine that her current offering, Frog Music, is a break from form. In fact, it's Room that's more of an anomaly in the author's canon. Donoghue has often crafted her novels by fictionalizing and elaborating on scant historical records to create richly detailed historical novels. Her first major success was 2001's Slammerkin, which was inspired by a one paragraph account in a Welsh historical encyclopedia of a girl who was executed (hanged and then burned!) for murder in 1763. When asked why she'd done it, she said it was for love of fine clothes.
From this jumping-off point, Donoghue imagines the life of Mary Saunders, first the unwanted daughter of a grindingly poor London family, then an at-first unwitting prostitute on the city's streets. When she becomes seriously ill, she endures a stint in a reformatory hospital for penitent prostitutes, but though she recovers and even earns praise for her good behavior, she eventually finds the restrictions and strictly regimented life of the hospital unbearable. She is released only when she tells the warden that she has a job waiting for her, working for an old friend of her mother's. Her liberation from the hospital is hard, and earning the money for her journey even harder. She gradually makes her way to the Welsh hometown of her parents and ingratiates herself into the household of a woman who was indeed once her mother's friend. As was the case in the hospital, Mary manages to fit in and even impress at first, but eventually she chafes under the routine, the rules, and the mundanity of life in the small village and quiet household. How and when murder figures into her bid for freedom comprises the suspenseful and thrilling latter half of the novel.
This book is sure to appeal to fans of historical fiction, particularly those who don't mind a bit of grit and grime. If you've enjoyed Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood, Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You, or the recent bestseller Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, then Slammerkin might be a good next read for you.