The School for Good Mothers

 By Jessamine Chan

Simon and Schuster     2022

336 pages     Literary

Dystopia! Thank goodness! The School for Good Mothers is Jessamine Chan’s first novel, and it is every mother’s nightmare.  

Frida Liu is divorced from Gust and shares custody of their toddler daughter, Harriet, with him and his partner, Susannah. Frida is overtaken by stress and anxiety one day and leaves Harriet alone for two hours while she goes to her office to pick up some paperwork. Neighbors hear Harriet crying and report Frida to Child Protective Services. And her nightmare begins!

As mothers, we have all done things that we might be ashamed of—spanking, ordering kids to go play outside, denying them treats when they misbehave, and on and on.  In Philadelphia in an unknown dystopian future, punishment for reported mothers is far worse than a slap on the wrist. Harriet’s custody is given completely over to Gust, Harriet’s father, and Frida is sent to a “school for good mothers” where she must undergo one year of re-education in parenting and only have a once-a-month phone conversation with her daughter. If Frida disobeys the rules of the school or fails to grow in her mothering skills, the phone conversation is denied. Her ability to ever get custody of her daughter depends completely on her ability to learn new skills as a mother.

Mothers at the school are there for a variety of reasons, but all have been brought to the attention of Child Protective Services at some point in their parenting. At the school, each mother is given an AI doll that closely resembles their own child, and the doll records every moment he or she is with their mother. One of the key components of the novel is the invasive nature of facial recognition software—something that we are just beginning to understand.

The story is told through Frida’s eyes, but it is told in the third person. We are able to have a somewhat detached, although horrified, view of the school and the mothers and the potential power of artificial intelligence.

The School for Good Mothers took me quite a while to read, and every reading session was haunting. I found myself questioning what makes a good mother nearly every day as I watched families while I was on vacation. I told the basic plot to several people as I was reading it, and everyone had examples of “bad” parenting from within their own lives. For example in the novel, one young mother was at the school because she had her 12-year-old niece take care of her baby when she was called into work. As a 12-year-old, I was babysitting all over the neighborhood. No one reported those mothers!  The other day, I watched a mother trying to cope with a screaming toddler in the checkout line at the grocery store. I remembered hauling a screaming child out of the grocery store, leaving a cart full of groceries behind!

No matter how hard Frida tries, she cannot succeed in becoming a good mother. The NY Times reviewer says, “Chan poses a grim question: What happens to a person when she has no way to beat an intolerable system and no way to escape it?”

The reviewer concludes: “Chan’s ideas are livid, but her prose is cool in temperature, and the effect is of an extended-release drug that doesn’t peak until long after you’ve swallowed it. One test of speculative fiction is whether or not it gives you nightmares, and when mine came — I knew they would — it was a full week after I’d finished this time bomb of a book. ‘This is a safe space, ladies,’ a faceless captor was telling me in my sleep. Terrifying.”

 I have not had any nightmares yet, but I am constantly aware of the parents around me, and for the most part, their awesome skill in parenting. The School for Good Mothers was very disturbing and I will be thinking about it for a long time.

The School for Good Mothers has been optioned to be a movie or a tv series. I will be looking forward to it.

Jessamine Chan’s website.