Reviews with content warning for Gaslighting - The School for Good Mothers

Reviews tagging 'Gaslighting'

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

78 reviews

msbarnesela's review

dark emotional sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book is speculative fiction…for now. It’s a brutal representation of the ways that society expects motherhood to look, the ways that we add expectations and judgments but never real supports. The inequality of expectation and blame for mothers when compared to fathers. The way that a system that says it’s trying to do what’s best for children but so often doesn’t. There’s also some AI ethics issues in the background—surveillance, tech-driven diagnosis of human emotions, and the cruelty of creating robots with real human feelings.

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luisagerdsmeyer's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

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matcha_pages's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

The premise drew me in, it's a chilling dystopia where mothers are held to impossible standards and judged for everything they do. There's so much tension, despair, and gaslighting that it makes you question your own perceptions of what being a good mother means. As much as that reeled me in, the book felt repeatitive and drawn out. There were also elements of world building that seemed unfinished. It was a good book, but had potential to better.

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honeymoonleo's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.5

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tiredenglishteacher's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Heartbreaking, haunting, scathing assessment of the ways in which mothers and fathers are held to different standards. A story that will stay with me for a long time.

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heynonnynonnie's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This is such a heartbreaking book. I like sad books and man, this was sometimes hard to keep reading. But there's so many beautiful sentences and hidden nuance here that I couldn't leave the book alone for long. I kept switching between audiobook, hardcover, and ebook, and I kept leaving notes and thoughts all over the three formats because I kept finding things that hit so strongly.

This book really took the concept of unsympathetic and white dystopians and fkn smashed it into the ground. It doesn't feel like there's distance when reading. It doesn't really feel like an abstraction or like everything is cloaked in layers of metaphor and symbolism. Felt like I was being crushed the whole time. Did I cry? Yup. Did I spend a lot of time thinking about how angry I got when people tried to question the non-white parts of my upbringing? Oh absolutely.

I love this book as a metaphor for the harm that model minority mentality creates for the individual who follows it and the people it ostracizes. At first, I wasn't a big fan of the ending, but I found there was a lot of depth and satisfaction in it when I explored the model minority metaphor more fully.

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