School for Good Mothers
Exhausted and overwhelmed, Frida Liu leaves her eighteen-month-old daughter, Harriet, home alone for a couple of hours on one very bad day. A neighbor hears the child crying, the police are called, and in that single lapse Frida loses custody — and is enrolled in a chilling new government program designed to rehabilitate "bad" mothers.
Sent to a surveilled campus ringed with barbed wire, Frida and the other women are stripped of their belongings and autonomy and made to prove their fitness on lifelike robotic children, every gesture and feeling measured and scored. To have any hope of getting Harriet back, Frida must satisfy a system that seems designed for her to fail.
Jessamine Chan's debut, The School for Good Mothers, is a sharp, unsettling dystopian novel about motherhood, surveillance, race, and impossible standards — a near-future parable that asks who gets to decide what a good mother is, and what it costs to fall short.
A mother who loses custody after one lapse and must prove her fitness inside a punitive government program.
Frida's toddler daughter, whose custody hangs on Frida's performance.
Frida's ex-husband, who shares custody with his younger partner.