Book review: The School for Good Mothers

Last weekend we traveled to Connecticut for a wedding. With friends and their two-year old daughter we rented a house along the Niantic Bay, and spent the weekend lounging near the water. While we relaxed I read Jessamine Chan's The School for Good Mothers (2022). I picked this book up from the library because it seemed like a good potential comp for Dandelions, my current wip.

Since The School for Good Mothers seems to me to be both literary/book club fiction and grounded sci-fi, I wanted to read it to see how and when Chan introduces the sci-fi-eque parts of the book. The first few chapters seemed fairly straight-contemporary, and the first place that we begin to see difference between our world and the book's world is in the quick-reach of government and the impact of big-tech. These aspects of world building are not directly tied to the plot, but they do help to ground the differences. Then when the larger sci-fi elements emerge closer to the end of the first third, they feel like a continuation and not a twist.

This book was both very enjoyable and a little hard to read. The short sentences carried a lot of urgency, and kept me turning the pages and very engaged in the story. At the same time, reading about how depressing motherhood can be, while staying with a two-year old really hammered home that raising a child is a lot of work, and emotionally draining, and left me feeling like I was living inside the book. I don't know if I would have felt the same emotional gut punch if we weren't also witnessing the books themes in real time.

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