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.

Birnam Wood

By Eleanor Catton

Farrar, Strauss & Giroux     2023

432 pages     Literary

Where to start on the best book I have read this year? The setting? The South Island of New Zealand. The time frame? 2017. The cast? A group of environmental idealists called Birnam Wood and their primary members, Shelley and Mira. A would-be journalist named Tony. An American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, and a newly knighted businessman and his wife, Sir Owen and Lady Jill Darvish. The plot? OMG, the plot! The plot would be nothing without this cast of amazingly-written characters, each so important to the plot that it would be nothing if the reader hadn’t come to know the characters so intimately.

Mira and Shelley are the organizers and leaders of a gardening collective named Birnam Wood. The group’s purpose is to plant trees, plants and vegetables on unused or abandoned land on the South Island of New Zealand. Mira has heard about a huge farm close to a national park that has been abandoned because of a gigantic landslide and decides that this might be the next big project for Birnam Wood. Early in the plan, she comes in contact with the American techno billionaire, Robert Lemoine, who also has his eyes on the farmland, but for far different reasons. He realizes that Birnam Wood might be the perfect coverup for his nefarious plans, and he convinces Mira that he has just bought the farm from Sir Owen Darvish. He offers Mira considerable money to come and use the land for their environmental purposes. Mira and Shelley bring the group to the farm, and they settle in, ready to farm the land. A former member of the group, Tony, has a lot of questions about a collective taking so much money from an American billionaire, and he sees the potential for a major exposé that will guarantee him a journalism career. Sir Owen Darvish only has understood little bits and pieces about Lemoine’s plans for his family farm, and his wife, Jill, knows nothing. The set-up is complete, and the plot begins.

The story line would go nowhere without 21^st century technology, and the vast amount of knowledge that Lemoine uses to manipulate the scene with technology of all sorts. His money has come from his drone company, and he uses those drones to monitor everything that happens on the farm. He also is able to drop in on the group and manipulate their cell phones and laptops and on and on. In this way, he controls all the situations and people like puppets. One reviewer compared Lemoine to Elon Musk, and I had Musk’s image in my mind throughout the book. I was quite impressed that Catton understood the technology so well that she was able to use it so successfully in her plot.

This is an incredible book, extremely clever and innovative. The set-up is amazing, and when the plot really began to take off, I almost had to hold my breath, because I had become so entrenched with the characters that I knew that nothing good was going to happen to any of them. And I will say no more about plot.

I can’t say enough about Catton as an author. One reviewer said, “Catton has a profound command of how perceptions lead to choice, and of how choice for most of us, is an act of self-definition.” For instance, Shelley worries about why she has a constant sense of dread. “She was trying to escape it now, but she would never escape it, because she could not feel the difference, could not understand the difference, between running toward something, and running away.” All the characters are very clearly defined and identifiable without being caricatures. I can’t say that I identified with any of them, but I sure knew who they were.

I have been to the South Island of New Zealand, and I hoped that I might have been to the national park described in the book, but Catton mentioned in the afterword that all the locations were made up.  I became intrigued with the book when I read a terrific review in The New Yorker, and then remembered that I had been given access to a copy of the book from the publisher. I highly recommend Birnam Wood.

The New Yorker review.

The Brave

By James Bird

Feiwel & Friends     2020

311 pages     Middle Grade

The Brave is a brave, sober, loving book that was introduced to me by my sixth grade granddaughter, Adela. I bought the book at her request, and we will have a book discussion after she finishes. While it is realistic fiction, it has some aspects of magical realism.

Collin is a 12-year-old with an OCD problem that makes it difficult for him at school. He counts all the letters in the words that people say to him. When he responds, he begins with the number of letters. So if his teacher says, “Good morning, Collin.” He would respond : “17. Good morning,” No matter how hard he tries, he can’t stop counting, and the school kids can’t stop harassing him. When things become unbearable, his alcoholic father sends him across the country with his dog, Seven, to live with his mother, whom he has never met.

Cecilia, his mother, is Ojibwe and lives on the Fond du Lac reservation outside of Duluth MN. Wait! Duluth! My home town! I called Adela and said, “You didn’t tell me it takes place in Duluth.” Oh yeah” she responded, “I forgot.” Actually, the reservation is about 15 miles from town.  Of course, to me, that made the book all the more important.  As a kid growing up in Duluth, there were kids from the reservation in our school, but native culture was pretty much a given in the culture of Duluth.

The native culture takes a secondary role in the story line, except, perhaps, for the magic that seems to surround a new acquaintance, Orenda. Orenda lives mostly in a tree house next door to Collin’s mother and grandmother. She believes that she is turning into a butterfly as her body deteriorates from ALS. Her mother, who died of ALS, is a butterfly that visits her frequently. Orenda is an incredible character in the book, and the fact that her father built her a treehouse makes her all the more magical.

As Collin becomes her friend, she teaches him about strength and bravery, and the stronger he becomes, the easier it is for him to manage at school and control his counting obsession. His mother teaches him about the purity of love, and he finds himself growing into the person that he wants to become. He gains enough mastery over his life that when Orenda is dying. he is able to manage the pain and grief. Collin muses at one point: “I wish I could take her pain away. I’d happily feel it if it meant she would feel better, but I also know she would never let me. It’s hers. It’s part of her story.”

I tried to read the book through the eyes of my 11-year-old granddaughter. She definitely will have seen the depth of the crisis at hand, and is responding to the challenges of bullying and the joys of beautiful relationships. One reviewer complained that some of the natives were stereotypes. “Still we should be past stereotypes of stoic, wise Indians who speak little and are abnormally attached to the great outdoors.” These details were things I was looking for as I read, but I became so involved in the beauty of the story line and the relationships that I didn’t pay attention to potential stereotypes.

Before I began The Brave, I read that it was on several lists of best books of 2020, including School Library Journal, and the New York Public Library, so I was surprised when I read negative reviews in The New York Times, The Circle Newspaper, among others. They felt that the Native American experience wasn’t accurate enough. But, that’s wasn’t what I was reading the book for. I saw a young boy and a teenage girl struggling, finding, and becoming the butterflies that they were destined to become. In my opinion, The Brave was just that, brave and beautiful.

Just two small caveats: Orenda is constantly followed by butterflies, and the woods around their homes are filled with butterflies. Ah, butterflies have a very short season in northeastern Minnesota. Likely they aren’t there in the autumn and winter. Also, she feeds peaches to  the butterflies. Peaches don’t grow in Minnesota—too cold. Oh well, but it’s a beautiful illustration.

James Bird, the author of The Brave, is a filmmaker and author. He is of Ojibwe descent and went to school in Minnesota. He has a new book, No Place Like Home, coming out in August.

Love Does

 By Bob Goff

Thomas Nelson     2012

224 pages     Spiritual

Bob Goff’s first book, Love Does, is a book of experiential stories from the author’s life and the spiritual lessons that he learned from those experiences. Here is a quick summary of the book.

“As a college student he spent 16 days in the Pacific Ocean with five guys and a crate of canned meat. As a father he took his kids on a world tour to eat ice cream with heads of state. He made friends in Uganda, and they liked him so much he became the Ugandan consul. He pursued his wife for three years before she agreed to date him. His grades weren't good enough to get into law school, so he sat on a bench outside the Dean's office for seven days until they finally let him enroll.
Bob Goff has become something of a legend, and his friends consider him the world's best-kept secret. Those same friends have long insisted he write a book. What follows are paradigm shifts, musings, and stories from one of the world's most delightfully engaging and winsome people. What fuels his impact? Love. But it's not the kind of love that stops at thoughts and feelings. Bob's love takes action. Bob believes Love Does.
When Love Does, life gets interesting. Each day turns into a hilarious, whimsical, meaningful chance that makes faith simple and real. Each chapter is a story that forms a book, a life. And this is one life you don't want to miss. Light and fun, unique and profound, the lessons drawn from Bob's life and attitude just might inspire you to be secretly incredible, too.”

Having had no knowledge of or experience with Bob Goff, I approached Love Does with curiosity. I had not been at the last church book group when the book was chosen, and I wondered what the attraction was. I soon found out. Each chapter begins with a story from his life, and ends with that story’s relationship to Jesus and the Christian life. Each chapter becomes a life lesson. I related to many of the stories in the book, and I found many of them to be quite meaningful. I read the book day by day, chapter by chapter. Each chapter gives the reader food for thought in a very delightful manner, and I found the chapters comforting when read for my own well-being at the end of the day.  

Bob Goff is an extraordinary person, a lawyer and author, dedicated to helping children who have been sold into slavery, particularly in Ghana. The profits from this book, and perhaps others of his book series, support his ministry around the world. I just discovered that Bob Goff will be in Grand Rapids and Holland Michigan in March. Isn’t it funny how something or someone you knew nothing about somehow becomes ever-present in your life.

Here is Bob Goff’s website. On his website, you can get access to his weekly podcasts. He’s quite a guy.

Verity

 By Colleen Hoover

Grand Central     2021

336  pages     Thriller

Well, now I have read a Colleen Hoover book after seeing her name on the NY Times bestseller list in four slots in one week. What kind of magic is she spinning? My friend and I decided to try out one of her books to see for ourselves what was going on. So, we chose Verity. Was this choice a big mistake, or are all of her books this outrageous? Don’t know because this is the only one I have read and probably the only one I will read.

Here is a synopsis of the plot as written by a Goodreads reviewer: "Lowen Ashleigh is set free from the long tedium of her daily life when she’s employed by Jeremy Crawford to ghostwrite the remaining books in a popular series his wife, Verity, is unable to finish due to an unfortunate accident. Lowe acquiesces in the spirit of hope: that this opportunity would help her acquire some small measure of celebrity and that celebrity would be oxygen to the fire of her career. But nothing prepares Lowen for Verity’s autobiography, which she accidentally stumbles upon one day. For the horror of it. Verity’s secrets paint a different picture of what Lowen thought she knew of Verity, Jeremy, and their lives together. But sooner or later, as these things often go, the whole truth will spill, and the fraught waiting in-between would come to an end, with havoc and screaming and loss."

Yeah, so…. I didn’t like the character of Lowen very much. I felt that her thoughts were poorly developed. She spent more time lusting after Jeremy than she did developing the books that she was hired to do. Should she tell Jeremy how evil Verity was—or was Jeremy just as evil? The chapters she read of Verity’s autobiography are just as confusing as are the actions of the supposedly comatose woman in the bed upstairs. But I kept reading!

Verity’s autobiography discovered by Lowen is horrifying. She spends more time writing about the sex she has with Jeremy than she does on the death of her daughters. I hated Verity for that. But I kept reading!

The plot is sickening, primarily because it deals with the deaths of twin sisters, one perhaps killing the other as very young girls.  Did this really happen?  But I kept reading. And why does Lowen see Verity sneaking around the house and nobody else does—including her nurse and her husband? But I kept reading until I got to the mind-bending ending.

Then once I finished the book, I discovered that Hoover had written an epilogue of sorts in the days following the publishing of Verity, which caused book lovers to have to buy another copy to read the additional chapter. Very smooth marketing move! So everyone kept reading!

I’m not sure that I will read another Colleen Hoover book. I told the friend who was reading with me that this book was f….. up, and she responded that it was ridiculous, obnoxious, and far-fetched. So why did I keep reading? It may be that this is the attraction with Colleen Hoover books—we just keep reading!

If you are trying to decide if you want to read Verity, look at the reviews in Goodreads. They are all over the place, and there are thousands of them. Wow! And therein is why she is on the bestseller list. Everyone just keeps reading!

Murder Book

 By Thomas Perry

Mysterious Press             2023

399 pages     Thriller

When I began Murder Book, I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into. I knew Thomas Perry by name and reputation, but I didn’t know how propulsive his novels were. Once I got started, I couldn’t stop. That’s saying a lot about the book right there!

Harry Duncan is a Chicago-based private eye having had a long career as a police detective. His ex-wife and U.S. Attorney, Ellen Leicester, called to ask him to look into some crimes being committed in an area of small towns in Indiana. She is worried that these crimes are an aspect of a much larger organized crime  operation. Why in small town Indiana? It seems an anomaly until Harry puts an end to the work of low-life bad guys who are extorting protection money from property owners in Parkman’s Elbow, Indiana. He then realizes that the crimes he has canceled are just the beginning. His search for villains takes him back to Chicago and then back to the Ash River in Indiana, where the solution to the crimes presents itself.

 The title, Murder Book, comes from the diaries that Harry keeps for every crime that he works on and solves. He writes down each day’s activities and the ideas he has for what he should explore the next day. We are privy to his thoughts, but more specifically, the reader sees the entire crime through Harry’s eyes and his actions. In other words, the focus of Murder Book is entirely on Harry. There are several other interesting characters, including the US Attorney, Ellen, but all of the action revolves around Harry. This creates a propulsive rush all the way through the book that keeps the reader turning pages.

The solution as to why the Ash River area in Indiana is the scene of the crime comes from an unlikely source—sandhill cranes. When I looked up “sandhill cranes in Indiana,” I found that they come to an area called the Jasper-Pulaski Fish and Wildlife Area, which is near the small town of Medaryville, Indiana. I am sure that this is the area Thomas Perry had in mind as he was writing the book. Some scenes take place in Chicago, which is about 90 minutes away from Medaryville. I looked all this up because I thought that the only Midwest place sandhill cranes spent time was at the Bernard Baker Sanctuary north of Marshall, Michigan. ( I have actually visited that sanctuary and watched the sandhill cranes.) I agree, it’s kind of funky, but it is a very clever plot device and totally unexpected.

I had to laugh at myself as I was reading Murder Book. I went for a hike in a woodland area and plotted how I would sneak through the area without anyone seeing me. Harry Duncan does that a lot—parks totally out of site, creeps around the grounds, and “cases the joint” without anyone knowing he is there. I found myself being Harry.

Last night I began watching The Old Man on Amazon Prime. This is a TV series based on a novel by Thomas Perry. I could see that much of what moved The Old Man along is what I was admiring in Murder Book. The Wall Street Journal says that Perry writes thrillers that move “almost faster than a speeding bullet.” Real Book Spy review says that this thriller “proves yet again that he remains one of the strongest writers in the genre today.”

If you love private eye mysteries, you will learn a lot from reading Murder Book. I heartily recommend it.

 

The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennett

By Katherine Cowley

Tule Publishing     2021

342 pages     Historical Fiction

Mary Bennett is the third girl of five in Jane Austen’s Bennet family. She is often passed over, ignored, or told to stop playing the pianoforte. Katherine Cowley has chosen to develop the character of Mary in her series of historical spy novels based on Jane Austen's characters. When The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet begins, Mr. Bennet has just died and the family is in chaos. They are trying to get ready for the funeral with funeral clothing and gloves and all the other protocol of an early 1800s funeral. A cousin, Mr. Collins, has arrived to take possession of the house; Mrs. Bennet is frantic; and Mary is quickly realizing that she has few options. She cannot stay unmarried in the home of her childhood.

An unknown relative, Lady Trafford, arrives and makes Mary an offer that she can’t refuse—move with her to Castle Durrington and obtain an education to be a governess. Mary feels she has no choice, and soon leaves with Lady Trafford and her nephew, Henry Withrow, to move into Castle Durrington, far away from her mother and sisters.

When she begins her education at the castle, Mary soon realizes that something is going on involving Lady Trafford and Mr. Withrow in what appears to be illegal activity—or is it spying--because England is beginning to fear an invasion from Napoleon Bonaparte, and Castle Durrington is right on the coastline. Mary sets out to discover what she can about these goings-on, all the while maintaining the pretense of learning drawing, French, economics, and history from her hosts.

As the book summary says, “Never underestimate the observation skills of a woman who hides in the background.”

A huge disclaimer as I continue this review. For reasons that I can’t explain, I had never read any Jane Austen books nor seen a single movie adaptation before I began Katherine Cowley’s inventive “next chapter.” All of the Bennet girls were strangers to me, and I had no grasp of Austen’s style of writing. So I struggled. I struggled as the difficult roles of women were discussed in great detail. I struggled through the way the women were discouraged from appropriately grieving their father’s death. I struggled through a several page discussion of how to fold paper so a letter could get mailed, protected from prying eyes. All of these details are extensively explored within the narrative.

I celebrate the vast amount of research that Cowley had to have done to include the details that I kept underlining, including, for instance, the name of a famous pastor of the day and his sermons and the way that women had to ride sidesaddle.  The beginning of each chapter quotes some of the research the author has done to aid in the understanding of what is going to happen in the upcoming chapter. The quotes alone are quite impressive.

Once the mystery of what was going on at the castle began to develop, I got caught up in the story line and became more impressed with Mary, her inquisitiveness, her courage, and her ability to step out of the bonds of convention in order to solve the mystery.

After I finished the book, I watched the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice and immediately noticed that the character of Mary is scarcely approached in the narrative. No wonder Cowley chose her to develop more fully.

What I didn’t mention previously in this review is that Katherine Cowley teaches writing at Western Michigan University and lives in our community. She will be at our book club next week, and I will have lots of questions to ask her. She also has two additional books in this series: The True Confessions of a London Spy, and The Lady’s Guide to Death and Deception.  I have both of them and plan to continue my adventures with Mary Bennet.

Katherine Cowley’s website. One of the interesting parts of her website is a series of blog posts about creative writing principles. She has won awards for her lessons. Check it out.