Contemporary Literature 55, 3 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/14/0003-0600  2014 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System SARAH BROUILLETTE Misogyny and Melodrama Emma Donoghue, Frog Music. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2014. 403 pp. $27.00. W hile it draws on the conventions of a variety of genres—it is a historical novel and a crime thriller, for example—Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music is, perhaps most importantly, a literary version of the 2011 best seller Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic novel by E. L. James famous for depicting women who enjoy being demeaned during sex and who love nothing more than to imagine themselves as men’s toys and possessions. Frog Music is more literary because it is clearly meant to appeal to a more learned audience. Compared to Fifty Shades of Grey, Frog Music features fewer sex scenes, better writing, fuller characterization, and a more elaborated plot based on extensive research about San Francisco in the 1870s and the real- life murder of one Jenny Bonnet, a woman who dressed in men’s clothing and made her living selling frogs to the city’s restaurants. Frog Music is also more literary in that, crucially, it moralizes about its protagonist’s sexual predilections, depicting them as ultimately unsavory and in need of overcoming. Donoghue has a Ph.D. in English and has written nonfiction about lesbian and queer relationships, including 2010’s Inseparable: Desire between Women in Literature, a kind of pop–academic guide to stories of romance between women, and her first book, based on her Ph.D. research, Passions between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801 (1993). Her early novels, Stir-Fry (1994) and Hood (1995),