The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan ( Amazon.com |  Bookshop.org )

Simon & Schuster, 2022

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982156121

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook

This book was like living through a nightmare trainwreck.

Single working mother Frida is separated from her two year old daughter Harriet after she leaves her home alone for more than two hours with the back door open. She is sentenced to a year at the School of Good Mothers, a new program that monitors neglectful parents as they work through a sadistic and brutal parenting curriculum that requires them to mother human-appearing child robots while depriving them of actual contact with their children. Mothers who don’t finish or pass will have their parental rights terminated and appear on a neglectful parent registry.

This has a similar feel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and the teachers, social workers, and administrators are the absolute worst versions you could come up with for those roles. The difference is, it is set in the present day, and it’s not impossible to imagine something similar actually taking place. The individual characters don’t matter as much.as the overall picture.

Frida is lucky in that her parents, ex, and his wife are all supportive of her, but even so, the end is inevitable.

Obviously no one  should leave a toddler at home unsupervised for two hours, but the state shouldn’t be rigidly and arbitrarily prescriptive and cruelly controlling of the ways we parent our children. The lessons of The School for Good Mothers are more damaging to Frida and her daughter than reparative.

The story flowed well, but it is chilling, a difficult read in our real world environment that is colder to women, and children, every day. Highly recommended.

Contains: suicide, suicidal ideation, murderous thoughts, racial slurs, solitary confinement, violence, mentions of pedophilia.

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski