School for Good Mothers

Frida Liu is an anxiety-prone, 39-year-old, Chinese-American single mom living in a Philadelphia much like ours when she is reported, after a spate of sleepless nights with her 18-month-old, for leaving her daughter alone for a stretch of time she later calls her Very Bad Day. Yet there is no room in Frida's world for bad days, let alone bad mothers, according to the state's increasingly empowered Child Protective Services which seamlessly takes Harriet and sets about surveilling Frida's home.

After a series of almost comically bad supervised visits, a judge deems Frida temporarily unfit. Her only hope for continuing to share custody of Harriet with her ex (and his doting girlfriend) is to pass exams meted out by a prized new government program. This twelve-month, live-in program, a 'school' situated on an abandoned college campus, will retrain Frida (and other bad mothers from across the county) in how best to parent.

Stunning and fearless, THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD MOTHERS gazes, with an ear for beauty and even occasional macabre humor, into an abyss some may find too dark to even fathom, yet which others face regularly, one way or another. Literary but with thriller-like stakes, it is a book, a la its protagonist, that refuses to be merely one thing as it pulls the reader along. Part a work refracting the realities of mothers and children caught by the existing child protective system, part a brilliant philosophical exploration of both desire and whether a 'bad mother' can ever be redeemed, part a biting evisceration of 'ideal' upper-middle class 'American' parenting (from the perspective of a character raised by immigrant parents), Chan's debut also at times, as increasingly feels necessary to reflect the experience of a person, let alone a woman, living in the world, invokes horror and the speculative to create profound emotional resonance.