The School for Good Mothers

so promising in terms of dystopian concepts, but delivery fell short. i wanted more creepy stuff basically lol

also some women are simply not meant to be moms. perhaps this was the point, but listening to frida say what she would've done, how much she really cares about her daughter, etc. after what she did was f-ing annoying. my own strained relationship with my mom might not help, but it certainly took away from my overall enjoyment

What does it mean to be a good mother? And what should happen to bad mothers? The School for Good Mothers tackles these questions in a new, interesting way.

Frida is a woman struggling to adjust to motherhood. A cheating spouse, a demanding workplace, and her own mental health challenges all contribute to Frida making a choice that results in a neighbor calling CPS. As a result of the investigations (and under threat of losing her daughter permanently), Frida is enrolled in a program designed to help her become a good mother. This is where the story takes a dystopian, troubling turn. The School For Good Mothers is a year-long, residential program that lumps offenders of all levels together. Parenting classes are frighteningly prescriptive, and the goalposts of success seem to be constantly moving. It's unclear what success looks like, but failure is specific and constant.

There is a lot to wrestle with in this book. Frida is a difficult character with whom to empathize. As a mother, I am certainly sympathetic to the challenges of parenthood, among them the immense societal pressure to parent “correctly” or risk screwing up your kids. The line between negligence and mistake can be blurry and difficult to navigate, but the choice Frida makes is so clearly negligent that it is difficult to feel sorry or troubled when she faces consequences.

The depth and reach of those consequences, however, feels too big - outsize for the infraction - and so the reader ends up on Frida's side, sort of. The School is a terrifying place, and the things that happen there are so clearly bad and wrong - but one is left wondering, what would be the right consequence? What should happen to parents like Frida? Whose kids should be taken away, and for what reasons? What should parents have to do to prove their fitness?

This would be a great read for fans of The Handmaid's Tale. I also think that this book would be a wonderful book club book, as the scope for discussion is so broad and relatable.

It's not everyday you finish a book that you don't really know what to do with. Overall, I enjoyed reading it. I don't regret having done so. But having finished it, do I walk away from it with some lingering feeling or impression? Not really.

This book is about a mother, Frida, who has “one very bad day”, and leaves her infant daughter alone at home for a few hours. Child protective services is called, the child is removed, and Frida is sent to a year-long reeducation pilot program for “bad mothers”. This school has much of the dystopian features that we associate with books like the “Handmaid's Tale” or “1984”, and much of the narrative is getting to know each of the women at this school and how they survive and what they endure, so on and so forth. Many similar books have been written since Atwood's novel–and that's not to diminish the quality of this book, but to lay the scene in order to ask if she really contributes something new.

This is Chan's debut novel. She's been a short story writer for some time, so she knows how to write. The book does not suffer many of the habits that more underdeveloped writers have in their first novels. However, something about it still feels like it is the first book written by the author. It's a little meandering, and its year-long timeline necessitates us being removed from the story for fairly large swaths of time, to be dropped back and zoomed in to a specific period of time with a brief summary of what happened between those moments. This lessens the horror that we are to feel about the nature of this school. Maybe if all of this were compacted within 6 months, it would have a greater sense of dread. But the pacing of the book is kind of odd, with some moments being unnecessarily drawn out and slow and others being so briefly summarized, that we start to feel like we don't in fact know these characters, or their lives, very well.

If there is one new thing that Chan brings to this general genre, it is some of the racial commentary. Chan herself is Asian, as is her protagonist here. I think Western mainstream audiences are still growing in their understanding of Asian Americans within the racial complexities of our society. The book skillfully shows us how the world is much more complex than simply all minorities being in tension with all white people, or Asians being lumped in with whites as “model minorities”. There are fascinating racial calibrations and navigations amongst the women at the school that are interesting to watch, even if nothing much happens or comes out of those tensions.

Additionally, I do appreciate how a lot of these characters are more fleshed out than in most debut novels. I especially appreciate that none of the characters were purely evil or righteous, with attempts at complexity and nuance being brought to different people's mindsets and actions. (But more on this in a minute.)

I do end the book with a sense of frustration, though. As the year progresses in the novel, I grew a growing interest in what was going to happen once her time at the school was over, but purely on an intellectual level. I don't think there was much about the text itself that was effectively ratcheting up the tension. Some of those latter months of the school program are really rushed through, almost as if Chan was on deadline and needed to finish the book and didn't quite know what to do with it.

But then, the ending comes. And it really falls flat. I'd read this whole book wondering if it was building up to something. And rather than ending with a bang, it does so with a whimper. It does attempt to make it interesting at the very end, but I don't think it works.

I am very comfortable with sad or unresolved endings in novels. I really love them, in fact. And I think that's what Chan is trying to do here. I think she's wanting to talk about how the system almost always wins, how there is not really any catharsis against injustice, and how no system and no person is completely good or completely bad.

And this ties back to my earlier statement about the characters being complex. I think Chan wants to stress the messiness of humans and systems. Not everything that this school does is horrifying. And many of the women at the school are women that we would not want to sympathize with or that we may think should be sent to a school like this. I appreciate that no one really has any sort of narrative arc–neither the systems nor the people.

From the beginning of the novel, I really liked Frida as a narrator, because she really was complex and on the spectrum between good and bad, we would probably think she was a little more on the selfish and narcissistic side. We actually do feel like she she is not well equipped or prepared to be a mother. She says thoughts that I'm sure every parent has, but never utters out loud. And yes, by the end, she wants to be a mother whereas there is some ambivalence in the beginning. But I cannot tell you how she got to that place. I don't actually think she has come to terms with any of the weaknesses or dysfunctions inside of her. Honestly, I am not rooting for her at the end.

I think throughout the novel, Frida really is screwed by the system unjustly, but I don't know that she's any different of a human coming out of this year-long hell than she went in. In fact, it seems like she may have collapsed in on herself and her narcissism all the more while there.

Maybe that is Chan's point: unjust systems, even if they are intended to help, will often make people worse than better, perhaps even to justify their own existence. But even if so, the contrast and the arc and the movement to that place is not well executed, in my opinion. This may be one of those books where inconsistency and a lack of vision and clarity is confused for complexity, nuance, and ambiguity. But I think there's a way to clearly demonstrate complexity, even if you want to do it with a “less is more” sensibility. I just don't think it was successful here.

I believe I read somewhere that this book has already been chosen to be made into a TV series. I'll probably watch it, and maybe they can flesh all of this out and create much more tension and depth. And I still am looking forward to Chan's later works. But though I mostly enjoyed the pros in this novel, I feel it was a bit thin and lacking depth which I feel Chan is capable of giving us. And that's a little frustrating. Or perhaps I am a bad reader. But I am learning to be good.

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan is a dystopian story about parenting, mothering, and the ways in which society judges. The story begins with Frida having a very bad day in which she left her baby alone while she went into the office. Though no harm came to baby Harriet, Frida gets caught and there her troubles begin. Frida is sent to a residential education program to learn to be a better parent, but the place is totally off-the-rails and each outrage is surpassed by the next. This is a really thought provoking book. Although what Frida did was dangerous and irresponsible, Chan does an excellent job highlighting how society (including its non-parent members) judges parents in general and mothers in particular. Several of Frida's classmates were there for things that either weren't actually abuse or weren't their fault. It was clear that in the world of the novel poverty, bad luck, or simply different parenting styles could be perceived as crimes equal to actual abuse. The expectation that women's dreams, needs, and identities will be wholly subsumed into raising their child was cast in stark relief as well as the ways in which society privileges some over others, and tries to quantify things that are, at least somewhat, subjective. The book seemed all too reflective of real attitudes toward parenting combined with a light sci-fi element to present an all to plausible dystopia. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I want to preface this review by saying this was required reading for my major. I do not typically gravitate toward dystopian/general fiction often.

That being said, the premise if the novel seemed interesting. Frida, a divorced mother, has a “very bad day” in which she leaves her 18-month old daughter home alone for 2 hours. She is inevitably caught, and has to attend the school for good mothers to try to regain custody of her daughter.

The story started off strong and I was totally hooked. However, as soon as Frida arrived at the school, the story took a huge shift. It was beyond repetitive and could have been waaaaaay shorter. I don't feel like the in-depth detail of each day/unit is necessary after the first two months or so. Not to mention Frida's attitude toward the other parents. She kept referring to her “very bad day” as if she was justifying what she did while judging everyone else.

Also, the ending was extremely lack luster. It was inevitable, yet left on a cliffhanger which could have easily been resolved. It was as if it was trying to give us shock factor yet completely missed the mark. This book just didn't stand out for me.

3.5!

The most effective and terrifying part of this book is how the “dystopia” feels less dystopian and more inevitable. The commentary on surveillance, patriarchy, the insurmountable pressures of motherhood, and the evils of the justice system were really spot on. Most of the characters were super compelling and I enjoyed the writing a lot.

Basically, I just felt like this book was too long. I struggle when the pacing of books is inconsistent and this is one of those instances. The length of the middle of the book overshadowed the compelling narrative aspects.

Read a review that said this would be better in first person and I cannot help but agree. Frida did this, Frida did that. It all felt so detached. The emotion I felt throughout this was anger. I was actually livid the entire time. Part of this is the structure of this world, specifically the shaming, that was purposely built to make me angry. But I think part of that anger comes from a complacency on Frida's part. We don't actually see her resist much at all until the very end and this resistance is undeveloped. It affects everyone around her, specifically Will, who has broken so many rules at her expense. She even confesses her love before doing what she does. Despite this, I think the end is very, very emotionally impactful. It has the most emotion of the entire book. Still, it's emotionality is undercut by details that are unnecessary. I think the most unrealistic aspect of this book is how the “bad mothers” ranged from objectively physically abusive mothers to people who ‘babied' their child? The commentary, that mothers are supposed to be perfect, doesn't work when we're forced to believe that an abusive mother's only flaw is that they aren't perfect. There is a separation, and it has nothing to do with perfection.

This was an interesting read. I was able to listen to the audiobook from my local library on the libby app.

If you have any issues reading about child or diving into dystopian motherhood, I would not pick this novel up.

This was an interesting take on what it means to be a mother and how we are ‘programmed' to be 100% perfect all the time, no matter what. I really enjoyed this novel. There were moments that I was upset at the way to program was super unfair to the mothers. It made me sympathize with Frida. I felt so sorry that she was having to endure so much pain and programming just to maybe get her daughter back, no guarantees.