Cover Image: The School for Good Mothers

The School for Good Mothers

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Member Reviews

I received an advanced digital copy of this novel from the author, publisher and NetGalley.com. Thanks to all for the opportunity to read and review. The opinions expressed in this review are my own.

The School for Good Mother's is a deeply emotional novel of what it means to be a "good mother". Set in the future where after just one mistake, a woman's whole life is upended, her daughter is taken away from her and she has to prove to the state, through odd and depressing training, that she is worthy to be a mom.

This novel is disturbing in the best way, and a little depressing. I loved it from beginning to end.

5 out of stars. Excellent read!

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This book hits it all -
- harsher rules for POC
- utilizes stereotypes to show differential treatment
- men granted more leniency
- women pitted against each other
- anti any non male/female relationships
- anti any woman's sexuality j
- anti any woman's identity outside of traditional roles
- majority of "mothers" are young - late teens/early twenties

Wow. This book takes a hard look - but not unfounded. Not unfounded. This is women's future - reported for mostly minor infractions, pooled with those with pose actual threats to their children. Terrifying.
Chan does an amazing job of using American culture - without extremism. This is what we are on the brink of!

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This is the best novel of 2022. Such an important story, can't wait for the adaptation. Also, I had a debut in 2022.

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I picked this book up when I was about 6 months pregnant. I found the beginning of the book triggering. Though the stress of motherhood is DEFinitely real, I just could not get behind the main character and her reasoning behind her transgression. I found myself hating her voice and all of her actions and it was a distraction for me from the novel.

This wasn't for me.

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this was an interesting premise, but the style was quite irritating to me and I ended up not finishing. I may revisit at some point in the future, but for now this book just was just too negative for me at the moment.

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I appreciate the publisher allowing me to read this book. I really enjoyed this one the plot kept me interested until the end which is not easy, and the characters were engaging and believable. I highly recommend this book.

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Does a great job probing the scary and frustrating realities of being a mother even while set in a fictional world. You could feel the main character's fear and anger throughout, and it kept me reading to the last page.

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Thanks so much for the review copy. I just love a great debut novel. I look forward to reading more books by Chan. Thanks again

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I couldn't decide whether to give this book 3 stars or 4 stars. After much thought, I decided it deserved 4 stars because it definitely held my interest. The 3 stars would have just been because it was a very uncomfortable book to read. And think about what it would be like if this kind of situation were a reality.

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Centers around a mother who had “a very bad day” where she leaves her toddler home alone for two hours. As her punishment she is sentenced to go learn how to be a “good mother”. Which is taught in a very Orwellian way with the children being robots and the mothers constantly being watched.

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I was really excited to read this book - the premise seemed really unique, and I expected a sort-of feminist cultural critique of motherhood. And somehow this book both is and isn’t that at all.

I’ll admit, although the story dragged in a lot of places, there did come a point toward the end where a particular scene left tears in my eyes. Despite the repetitive nature of the plot and the heavy-handedness of its thematic criticism, there were moments of powerful writing. But it tries to hard too be Handmaid’s Tale meets Orange is the New Black, and it doesn’t quite pull it off in a way that I found satisfying or provided any deep literary criticism of modern motherhood.

To put it simply, The School for Good Mothers is the story of a new mother named Frida. One day she decides to leave her baby alone at the house while she runs errands, and a neighbor turns her in. Facing child abandonment charges, Frida is sentenced to a year at a rehabilitation school for mothers and must pass in order to regain custody of her child. But the school’s teaching method incorporates one slightly creepy element - extremely life-like dolls that the mothers must learn to care for perfectly.

My goal is to always review the book I read rather than the book I wish I read, so beyond my disappointment in it not living up to its premise, I have to say this book put me in a bit of a reading slump. Something that should have only taken me days to read took my over a week. I was often bored with the direction the story took when there seemed to be so many other interesting avenues to explore. The main character seemed to change her mind from one chapter to the next with no pretense, so it was difficult to understand how she really felt in each moment. Personally, I started to find her a little annoying.

As I said before, the premise was pretty original and bizarre enough that I kept reading, but the author doesn’t really explore much past that initial hook. And that’s all the doll part is - a hook for the story about a “bad” mother who’s learning to be “good”.

I’m not a mother myself, nor do I have any desire to be. Maybe this book would appeal more to mothers, as they’d identify more with the plights of the characters. For me, I couldn’t get invested.

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What a disturbingly amazing read this was!

In a dystopian world where 'bad mothers' are scolded, punished and banished for infractions big and small, there exists a pilot program with promises to retrain and rehabilitate those who have lost their parental rights. For Frida Liu, who has lost guardianship of her daughter Harriet after a fatigue-induced very bad day, The School for Good Mothers is her final hope of reuniting. For one year, the thought of her daughter must be enough to prove that she deserves a second chance and that a mother's love truly knows no bounds.

I was intrigued by the premise of this and I love books with a dystopian/ alternate reality vibe. But this? This was so much more. It was gripping, I couldn't stop reading. It gave me all the feelings. The rage, the sadness!

The commentary on the expectations we have of mothers, the difference in what society believes are the responsibilities of a mother vs. a father and the overwhelmed CPS system were relatively accurate and gut-wrenching. This is not a happy book but it's an important one- one that I'd definitely recommend buddy reading or using for book club.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for sending a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

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I loved this unique, chilling book which raised a lot of questions & was an excellent book to discuss with friends. It’s very original & thought-provoking.

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This book was so much fun to read. I was on the edge of my seat wondering what would happen with Harriet the entire time. I was praying for the ending to happen the whole year Frida was away. This book gives off major Handmaid’s Tale vibes and is such a quick read.

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I overall liked this book. I think the idea is really strong, and not as far off as a lot of people seem to think. There are parts of THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD MOTHERS that are so tense I couldn’t stop reading. I especially loved the ways certain harms of children were criminalized while others were celebrated, and the ways that gender played into success. I thought overall this one was smart and entertaining way of examining the criminalization of parents.


The start and end of this book are extremely strong and the middle is too long and repetitive. But for a debut, it’s working on a lot of levels. I will say if you’re a new parent this book might be especially difficult to read.

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This book is riveting. My daughter is just a little younger than Harriet is at the beginning of the book, and I found Frida's separation from her gut-wrenching. If someone took my child away, I would really and truly drop dead. I understand the comparisons to Margaret Atwood that this book is getting and a lot of the women at the School remind me of women who I met when I worked in a corrections setting. Some of them really did terrible things, but many of them were just at a crossroads of poverty and a bad decision. I think what works really well is how obvious it is that Frida is a good mother in every way that really matters, but all of these metrics put on her cannot measure the love between her and Harriet. I think that in this way Chan builds a clear, harsh critique of the unbalanced way that children are taken from their parents and put into foster care. Just, in this book, it's bumped up a lot with surveillance, people turning their neighbors in, and even social media posts getting kids taken away. The state does more trauma to Harriet than Frida's "very bad day" ever did. With the lessons at the school, she critiques the unrealistic expectations on mothers that are imposed by just how many voices want to tell mothers exactly how to parent. I think it works better, though, because Frida does something that actually is a pretty unsafe, scary thing to do--under sleep deprivation, yes--so it's not like *nothing* should have happened, but what does happen is so clearly not the right solution.

I appreciated the complexity of Frida's relationship with Gust and Susanna. I could have done without the romantic pairings later in the book. By that point, I was so much more invested in the motherhood story that I just did not have time for Curtis, even as I saw what Chan was trying to do with that thread in her commentary on how all-consuming motherhood is expected to be.

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Really enjoyed this one! So a unique premise and honestly felt very real. As a new mother, I related a lot to this book. It’s one that will stay with me for awhile and I find myself thinking about often. Highly recommend!

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Thank you to @netgalley and @simonandschuster for my gifted copy of School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan! This book is out now.

I didn’t enjoy this dystopian commentary of parenting. It seemed a little harsh, though that may have been the point. It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t think it was executed well.

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I was on the fence on whether to buy this book for my high schoolers but after 9th grade got assigned Handmaid's Tale I figured it would be a good readalike. It's a great read full of interesting conflicts and great characters.

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I wish I'd read this in a book club. There's so much to discuss and think about. It's a book I will be thinking about for a long time to come.

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