Reviews with content warning for Body horror - The School for Good Mothers

“A mother is a shark,” Ms. Russo says. “You’re always moving. Always learning. Always trying to better yourself.”

Absolutely relentless in examining the violence of the state against women, particularly women of color and those from immigrant families. I would not classify this as dystopian or sci-fi; probably speculative fiction. As angry and sad as this made me, it would only be worse for a parent/soon-to-be parent.

The New Yorker article “Where Is Your Mother?” by Rachel Aviv is among the cited works in the acknowledgments, and I was horrified to see how many of the small details were taken from real life incidents. Worth a read: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/02/where-is-your-mother

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theskyboi's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

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

5.0

Thank you to Book Club Favorites at Simon & Schuster for the free book for review!

At the novel's outset, Frida Liu has had a lapse in judgment on a hectic day, and she has decided to leave her daughter, Harriet, at home alone. From this point forward, Frida is forced to prove her worth as a mother, as a woman, and as an American citizen at the eponymous School for Good Mothers.

In this stunning debut, Jessamine Chan interweaves the fabrics of literary and speculative fiction by telling a tale that some may call paranoid while others may feel is more aptly deemed prescient. Amid the tools of modern-day surveillance, these so-called bad mothers are given the chance to regain the lost custody of their children upon completing an experimental curriculum within the fenced-in confines of a dystopian learning center. Faced with the disappointment of watching her ex-husband and his new girlfriend raising her daughter, Frida is more determined than ever to put her whole heart into learning how to become the ideal caregiver.

Without spoiling too much, I'll say that the ways in which Chan dives into the genre of speculative fiction through The School for Good Mothers took me by surprise. Equal parts commentary on race, class, mental health, prejudice, and misogyny, this story is thoughtful in the way it draws and redraws lines between good parenting and unfair sentencing within the American justice system. Even given the dense and emotional themes, Chan still finds a way to capture a reader's imagination with a near-future feel to the mechanisms at play in Frida's life. By far, this was the perfect way to start my first read of 2022, and I can't recommend it enough!

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