The School for Good Mothers

Written By Linda Malek

The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

Reviewed by Linda
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Thank you @wearemediahive for this copy!

This book has really crept into my brain and I'm still thinking about the main character, Frida Liu. Think big brother, handmaid's tale and social services gone horribly wrong - crazy, harrowing but at times ridiculous!
Frida, mother of an 18-month old, is having a very bad day and an overall hard time. Her husband left her for his mistress months prior, and she's now juggling a job and joint custody of their baby. One afternoon, Frida leaves her baby, Harriet, at home and drives to work. A quick 30-minute errand and a coffee turns into 2 hours and she comes home to find the police and social services on her premises ready to arrest her for neglect and abandonment.
Frida loses custody and enters into a draconian parenting correction unit for a year with 200 mothers. For each mother, the mantra is, "I am a bad mother, but I am learning to be good." Frida replaces Harriet with Emmanuelle: a near-living doll, that matches her child's specifications. The women are brutally judged 24/7 via the instructors, cameras in their rooms and built into the dolls themselves, and by other mothers.
Those unable to rise to the task face dire consequences.
The question is what makes a bad mother? And is anyone fit to be one? Of course, leaving a baby alone for 2 hours on one very bad day is poor form but does this warrant being locked up in a correction facility for a year? The school was way too extreme for me but that is what dystopia is, a parallel society that is believable and unbelievable at the same time. I wish the author depicted the protagonist's blatant mental health crisis a bit better or provided a different scenario for being sent away.
Readers will love or hate Frida but despite her issues and the slight repetition, I appreciated her commentary whilst in the facility, which touched on racial and cultural inequality within motherhood, the expectation of men versus women in parenthood and much more.

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

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