ReView: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

“I am a bad mother, but am I learning to be good.”

As people, how do we determine what is “good”? How many mistakes are we allowed to make before we are deemed “bad”?

In the world of motherhood in The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan, the lines are incredibly blurry. Chan’s eerie, thrilling and absorbing novel creates a fully formed world based around the complicated expectations mothers face both internally and externally.

Frida Liu had a very bad day. After a divorce leaves her as a single mother, she leaves her toddler Harriet at home while she runs out for an errand, and to work. News travels fast and before Frida can even beat herself up about her own choice, she finds herself defending her ability to mother. As part of her penance, she faces (what seem like harsh but all too realistic) consequences, including participation in a yearlong in-patient program to be a better mother.

I found this one to be incredibly disturbing, while at the same time being so endlessly readable and surprising (in the best way possible).

Chan does a phenomenal job of not only sharing the experience from Frida’s perspective but also shows the reader a variety of motherhood experiences, and that each is different due to race, socioeconomic status, parental relationships, and of course, gender. This is a complicated detail to navigate, and I appreciated how it was handled in The School for Good Mothers.

This transformative story also manages to highlight how the definition is constantly changing of what it means to be a “good mother.”

Even if you’re not a mother, this is an incredibly enlightening and all too relevant story. Furthermore, you’ll find yourself relating to the pressure of a “one size fits all” mentality; that being “good” isn’t something you can define or teach, we’re all just doing our best and that is enough.