Jessamine Chan

In this taut and explosive debut novel, one lapse in judgement lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance. Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough. Until Frida has a very bad day. The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida. The ones who check their phones, letting their children get injured on the playground; who let their children walk home alone. Because of one moment of poor judgment, a host of government officials will now determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion. Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that a bad mother can be redeemed. That she can learn to be good. A searing page-turner that is also a transgressive novel of ideas about the perils of “perfect” upper-middle class parenting; the violence enacted upon women by both the state and, at times, one another; the systems that separate families; and the boundlessness of love, The School for Good Mothers introduces, in Frida, an everywoman for the ages. Using dark wit to explore the pains and joys of the deepest ties that bind us, Chan has written a modern literary classic.

A Novel

The School for Good Mothers

Syrina

Helen 

She never thought of herself as living ina city full of children, but maybe every city and every neighborhood is full of children when you've lost your own. 

Stephen Schenkenberg

The family of yellers two doors down are outside smoking weed and clinking beer bottles. Loud white Americans taking up space. She never claimed her space.

Beck Krystal

Emmanuelle arches her back and screams with abandon. It is a cry of lost love, families torn apart Dy war, a cry for the earth and its natural disasters. The falsehood of her body and how she must suffer without growing up.

Emiley Jones

Before Susanna appeared in her life, Frida hadn’t understood that the gap between 28 and 39 could be so potent and deadly. 

It wasn’t the pleasure of sex or love or sunsets, but the pleasure of forgetting her body, her life. 

She thought that becoming a mother would mean joining a community, but the mothers she’s met are as petty as newly minted sorority sisters.

At dinner parties, she wanted to touch their throats and play with their long, tangled hair—wondered what it was like to wear sadness so close to the skin and be loved for it.

She wants to tell him that these buildings are composed of pheromones and regret. Hostility. Longing. That it’s possible to stop noticing sadness. That the sound of women crying now resembles white noise.

It doesn’t matter that love can’t break a fever. That love can’t be measured. Anything can be measured. They have the tools now. 

The School for Good Mothers quotes

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