Hilda C. Landers Library & Archives

Frog Music, Emma Donoghue’s latest novel, is a delightful, tragic, and hilarious journey through 1870s California. Jumping between the months of August and September 1876, Donoghue weaves a tale of four French émigrés trying to survive in a rapidly growing San Francisco suffering from a simultaneous heat wave and smallpox epidemic.

Readers familiar with Donoghue’s 2010 book, Room, might be surprised with this work of historical fiction. Frog Music represents a thematic return to Donoghue’s earlier books, such as Life Mask, Astray, and Slammerkin – including questions of independence, female sexuality, and same sex attraction. As in many of her novels, Donoghue uses historical fiction to discuss the lives and experiences of women outside the realm of perceived propriety.

Frog Music opens with a murder. Jenny Bonnet, an “eccentric” young woman who catches frogs for a living, is shot dead in a roadhouse just outside of the city. Her friend and companion, Blanche Beunon, goes on to chronicle her brief friendship with Bonnet and her search for the murderer. Beunon, a burlesque dancer known to admirers as “The Lively Flea,” is a compelling narrator as she records a life of domestic abuse, forced prostitution, and baby farming.

With Frog Music, Emma Donoghue gives us historical fiction as it should be – fun, inventive, and entirely believable. Extensive research of Bonnet’s real-life murder in 1876 and details such as the lyrics for historic burlesque songs enriches this enthralling murder mystery. Frog Music is a must-read for any fans of historical fiction!

Availability: USMAI
Review Submitted by: Kaitlyn Grigsby
Rating: Highly Recommended

Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) is a story of Mitchell Zukor, a man obsessed with 21st century cultures of fear and the “worst case scenarios” which may strike at any time. After graduating college, Zukor begins to work on the “cutting edge of corporate irresponsibility” in order to indemnify large financial firms against liability in the event of large-scale disasters. Tapping into the anxiety that has defined the early 2000s (i.e. 9/11, Katrina, Financial Meltdown), author Nathaniel Rich places Zukor and Alec Charnoble at the epicenter of geopolitical power and fear: New York City. Zukor acts as a “natural terrorist” and a “Old Testament avenger” to scare companies into retaining expensive consulting services of “FutureWorld” which dubiously act in a court of law to indemnify these companies against suits by staff and clientele killed through corporate negligence. But Zukor, would up in his ornate doomsday prophecies, fails to see the all-too-predictable and real-life worst case scenario of an unseasonable hurricane before it crashes into Manhattan. Alongside the hilarious and calculating Jane Eppler, Zukor is forced to put aside his imagined fears to survive the storm and the FEMA-led recovery.

Although Odds never once mentions the phrase, “climate change,” the book is clearly contributing to the swelling tsunami of fiction which treats and takes climate change seriously (fans call it “cli fi”!). In the book, the apocalyptic hurricane Tammy is augmented by warmer-than-normal seas and the drought-hardened earth that cannot absorb Tammy’s deluge. In 2012, workers at the publishing facilities of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux eerily uncovered advanced copies of this novel when they re-opened their offices after “superstorm” Sandy slammed the Eastern Seaboard. Rich made the final proofs to his novel just following the storm he inadvertently foretold. He discusses this and cli-fi in a NPR interview with Angela Evancie: “So Hot Right Now: Has Climate Change Created a New Literary Genre?”

What constitutes a “natural disaster” in the 21st century? In a world of climate change and extensive risk analyses, do the old “acts of god” still fit the bill? Jeffrey Klueger penned an op-ed in Time magazine titled, “Is Global Warming Fueling Hurricane Katrina” on August 29th, 2005, when Katrina’s winds still battered New Orleans homes. Over a decade earlier, author and climate activist Bill McKibben asked if we have arrived at “the end of nature.” He argued, in his 1991 book by the same title, that there is no terrestrial ecosystem on the planet that lacks the fingerprint of human activity. As humans pump green house gas pollution into the atmosphere, McKibben and Kleuger at least implicitly argue that human beings have become responsible for “nature” and its “disasters.” When the heat from our engines contributes to the dynamo of hurricanes, we trouble the (perhaps always flawed) distinctions between the realms of “culture” and “nature.” If one accepts that natural disasters must affect people to be considered a “disaster” instead of a “hazard,” do the cities and businesses placed in risky environments construct future violence even in times of peace? Are all natural disasters really just human disasters naturalized in a denial of our collective agency?

Odds Against Tomorrow explores the pits of American anxiety in a profoundly tumultuous world while depicting a massive, human catastrophe. From foresight, to preparation, to response, Odds Against Tomorrow propels the reader forward through a literary thriller that also stands as a clinic on the uneven vulnerability people face in an era of climate change and high finance run amuck. Who stands to lose and win in this brave new world? Its hard to know: “the future is not what it used to be.”

Availability: USMAI
Review Submitted by: Shane D Hall
Rating: Category 5 Summer Read. Not to be read in Manhattan during a storm!!!

This book made me laugh so hard that my family made me read it aloud in the living room. This book goes into both the hilarious and the depressing parts of Allie’s life, but it often delves into the strange parts of her life, like when she ate an entire cake herself or when she dug up a letter that she had written to herself as a child. Read this book somewhere that it is acceptable to laugh loud because you will be doing a lot of it.

Availability: SMCM Library
Review Submitted by: Andrew Lachkovic
Rating: Highly Recommended

What are you reading this summer?

Let us know by joining the Library Summer Reading Program. From June 2 to August 15 you are invited to share your opinions about books you loved, hated or can’t stop talking about. Whether you are reading this year’s big beach book, revisiting the classics, cracking open a literary masterpiece or finally reading that fantasy or YA novel everyone is watching; we want to know if we should read it. We will even give you prizes if you tell us. Not sure what to read? We have recommendations and Kindles full of books for students, faculty and staff on campus.

The Summer Reading program is open to all members of the SMCM library community including students, staff, faculty, alumni and residents of the Tri-County area (St. Mary’s, Calvert and Charles counties.) You may read anything you want as long as a copy is available at the SMCM Library or via USMAI or the Southern Maryland public library (COSMOS). You don’t need to check the book out of the library. To get points you must post a review on the blog.

For more information visit the Library Reading Circle.

The Library at St. Mary’s College of Maryland’s Summer Reading Program will begin on June 2 and end on August 15, 2015.

The Summer Reading program is open to all members of the SMCM Library community including students, staff, faculty, alumni and residents of the Tri-County area (St. Mary’s, Calvert and Charles counties.) You may read anything you like as long as a copy is available at the SMCM Library or via the USMAI or public library (COSMOS) catalogs. You do not need to check the book out of the library. To get points you must post a review on the blog.

See About Summer Reading for more information.