The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
Frida Liu is having trouble. Her career is not commensurate with the sacrifices made by her Chinese immigrant parents. Gust, her husband, won’t give up his younger mistress who is obsessed with wellness. Their cherubic daughter Harriet is the only one who helps Frida eventually reach the level of perfection everyone was expecting. Even though Harriet is all she has, she is sufficient.
till Frida had a terrible day. Mothers like Frida are a target for the state. the parents who let their kids get hurt on the playground, check their phones and let them walk home alone.
The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan
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A number of government officials will now decide whether Frida qualifies for a Big Brother-like organization that evaluates the success or failure of a mother’s dedication due to one moment of poor judgment.
In order to save Harriet, Frida must demonstrate that a horrible mother can be changed. so she can develop moral character.
The School for Good Mothers introduces Frida as an all-time classic woman in an “intense” (Oprah Daily) and “captivating” (Today) page-turner that is also a transgressive novel of ideas about the dangers of “perfect” upper-middle-class parenting, the violent perpetrated against women by the state and, occasionally, one another, the systems that divide families, and the boundlessness of love. Chan has created a modern literary classic by examining the joys and pains of the strongest relationships that bind us with dark wit.
When Frida is sleep deprived and behind on a deadline at work at the beginning of the novel, she makes the terrible decision to put her daughter Harriet in her stroller while running outside to get coffee and stop by the office to pick up a file she needs. Two hours later, the police inform her that they have her daughter. The judge will only return shared custody of her daughter after she has had supervised visits, had cameras installed in every area of her home, and been under continual observation.
But when Frida finally appears before the judge months later, she is not given any custody back but is instead sentenced to a year in a prison-like “school” for bad mothers. Women are criticized for failing to have their child’s immunization records ready for school, and for over-babying their children, and the reader begins to realize that the government is enforcing very tight standards around what constitutes a good mother.
