Book Review: The School For Good Mothers

Frida had fed and changed her toddler Harriet. She had a work deadline – an article to finish, a job hanging by a thread, a file she’d left in the office. She would go get it. Harriet would be fine. But then the neighbours heard her crying.

Soon, the state decides that Frida is not fit to care for her daughter. That she must be re-trained. That bad mothers everywhere must be re-educated. Will their mistakes cost them everything?

Please be aware that this review will contain spoilers.

The concept was intruiging, if a little grim – A book about a school for bad mothers seemed like something that might have great character development, some deep personal growth and some strong, if strained, relationships with others. I assumed that it would be a sad, but moving read with a happy ending.

Reader, I was very wrong, and comparisons to The Handmaids Tale were absolutey justified.

Frida is a 39 year old chinese american mother, trying to navigate life as an unexpectedly single mother in a state where she has no support system, holding down a job on no sleep. I am not a parent, and started the book from a position of ‘well that was clearly a bad idea’ when Frida leaves her 18 month old daughter home alone while she picks up a file from work. It was clear that she was under a lot of pressure and had made an error in judgement, and the book started from this position. I expected Frida’s situation to only improve from what I presumed was the low point of the book.

We then follow Frida through surveillance, and assessments by a social worker who is clearly both prejudiced and incompetant (some of those scenes really made my blood boil), followed by admission into a ‘school for good mothers’. It only got more horrifying the more that I read. The story frequently touches on racism, but mainly focuses on gender discrimination, starkly highlighting the differences between how the ‘bad fathers’ and ‘bad mothers’ are judged and measured according to this new social services movement. The statements from the authorities on what they expect a good mother to be, and how she is expected to act at all times are outdated and inhumane. While the children are the ones being portrayed as robots in this parody, it is clearly the mothers they are trying to re-programme. It is telling that none of the people running said program are parents.

Then, at the end after you’ve watched Frida jump through every concievable hoop and commit herself completely to the goal of getting her daughter back for this excrutiating year and a half ordeal, (spoiler coming) she doesn’t even get her daughter back because (checks notes) the judge thinks she’s ‘not ready for the responsibility’ and ‘someone like you should know better’. Firstly, that ‘someone like you’ has a really nasty undertone to it, and secondly the expectations set down for mothers graduating from this school were grotesque in the first place.

The book ends with Frida kidnapping her own child, content with the expectation that she will be arrested and spend most of her daughters childhood in prison, waiting for her to come and find her at 18. She views that as a fair price to pay for one more day, one more week with Harriet. I can’t find it in myself to judge her for that.

Essentially if you came here looking for a feel good book then run away as fast as you can. If you came here looking for something eye opening, surprising, with a heavy dollop of injustice, this is the book for you. I was absolutely furious when I finished reading, desperate to find someone (anyone!) with whom to rant about the ending. I advise reading this book in pairs so that you can unload appropriately afterwards.