Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with a copy of Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers.
Frida is beyond exhausted. She is newly divorced and struggling to achieve perfectionism, while caring for her eighteen-month old daughter and working full-time. Her mind is preoccupied with her ex-husband Gust, who has moved on to a new life with his much younger new wife. Not only is the new wife the woman Gust cheated on Frida with, but now Frida must share custody of Harriet with them.
During one of Frida’s weeks caring for Harriet, Frida makes a life-altering decision. While Harriet is napping, Frida decides to go on a quick errand to her office, where she is feeling the pressure of deadlines and trying to not have single-motherhood impact her career. Harriet will never even know that her mother was gone. Frida’s exhaustion makes her forgetful and the quick trip takes longer than she originally planned. By the time she returns home, the police have been notified about her neglect.
The consequences are severe. If Frida would like to maintain a relationship with her daughter, she must attend a year-long education camp, where mothers who have been neglectful, abusive or otherwise “unmotherly” are trained to be “good mothers.” They mothers are psychologically punished for their bad choices and must pass a series of tests where the odds of passing are low. Even if they survive the year at camp, if they do not pass the tests, their parental rights will be severed. During her time at the camp, she has limited contact with Harriet and during those calls, Frida is tormented to see her daughter increasingly look towards Gust’s new wife, as a mother figure.
The stakes are raised when realistic robots, robots that mimic the features of the mother’s own children, are assigned to each mother. The robots are new and experimental, but have been designed to calculate the emotions, including the range of love and tenderness in which each mother is capable. The mothers will be evaluated not only by their harsh human guards, but also by these previously untested robots.
The School for Good Mothers is a phenomenal debut novel. I was hooked from the first chapter and horrified by the content. It’s very much in the vein of Margaret Atwood or the television show Black Mirror. It has strong feminist themes, taking a deep dive at how women are carry unfair burdens in society and how expectations of how women should behave, especially stereotypes of motherhood, can be very detrimental.
I read this book a few months ago and I think it is especially timely with the latest threats to Roe v. Wade. Both the recent court news and this book, highlight the ways in which American society does not support women, even when women have children and need help. The School for Good Mothers shows the contrast in which women and men are treated. Gust behaves poorly, but is treated like a saint. He can leave his former wife struggling and move forward with zero repercussions. The women in the school know that there is a nearby school for fathers, but they learn that the fathers are not given the same level of punishment that the mothers are given. Women should know better and a woman who is not judged to be appropriately motherly is damaged. The men are allowed freedoms and access that the women are not permitted and their tests are not are dire. The women are facing judgement, while the men are biding their time.
The School for Good Mothers is a powerful and gut-wrenching read that I recommend to everyone. It’s fiction, but it reads like a terrifying, near-future reality.