Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The School for Good Mothers: A Novel
    The School for Good Mothers: A Novel
    The School for Good Mothers: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    The School for Good Mothers: A Novel

    Written by Jessamine Chan

    Narrated by Catherine Ho

    4/5

    ()

    Switch to ebook

    About this audiobook

    Longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
    Longlisted for the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence
    Shortlisted for The Center for Fiction 2022 First Novel Prize
    Selected as One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022!

    In this New York Times bestseller and Today show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick, one lapse in judgement lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance, in this “surreal” (People), “remarkable” (Vogue), and “infuriatingly timely” (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel.

    Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough.

    Until Frida has a very bad day.

    The state has its eye on mothers like Frida. The ones who check their phones, letting their children get injured on the playground; who let their children walk home alone. Because of one moment of poor judgement, a host of government officials will now determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion.

    Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that a bad mother can be redeemed. That she can learn to be good.

    An “intense” (Oprah Daily), “captivating” (Today) page-turner that is also a transgressive novel of ideas about the perils of “perfect” upper-middle class parenting; the violence enacted upon women by both the state and, at times, one another; the systems that separate families; and the boundlessness of love, The School for Good Mothers introduces, in Frida, an everywoman for the ages. Using dark wit to explore the pains and joys of the deepest ties that bind us, Chan has written a modern literary classic.

    Editor's Note

    Dystopian drama…

    A scathing commentary on the assumptions and stereotypes about mothers and the government powers that separate families, Chan’s dystopian drama is a page-turner. Frida Liu’s recent divorce may be the last straw, but at least she has her 18-month-old daughter — until she doesn’t. When the single mom leaves her child home alone for two hours, she’s sent to a rehabilitation facility where she must be a surrogate mother to other children in order to earn back her own.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateJan 4, 2022
    ISBN9781797135458
    Author

    Jessamine Chan

    Jessamine Chan’s short stories have appeared in Tin House and Epoch. A former reviews editor at Publishers Weekly, she holds an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and a BA from Brown University. Her work has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Wurlitzer Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Anderson Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter.

    Related to The School for Good Mothers

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for The School for Good Mothers

    4/5

    904 ratings56 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      You get the gist after three chapters. The themes of the book are really clear, but there are so many chapters that just lead up to nothing. It’s kind of disappointing. The book is emotional and raw but just felt anticlimactic and repetitive at times.

      4 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Wonderfully written but so dark and truly sad. Handmaid’s take vibes for sure! Almost too much for this mama to take!

      2 people found this helpful

    • 2/5
      The story in "The School for Good Mothers" is really worthy of one star, but you can tell that Chan is more than a competent writer, so I give my rating an extra star for that.

      First of all, it takes forever to actually get to the titular school. Everyone knows that the protagonist is eventually going to end up there, so there is not point to the theatrics leading up to that decision. I think that it would have been better if the novel just started on the bus to the school and everything beforehand was just included as framed narrative flashbacks.

      I think that this novel is really just parenting porn for people who want to feel better about themselves in that a parent-reader can see how terribly children are treated by the characters in the book and feel good about themselves because "at least they're not that bad of a parent".

      All of the criticisms about parenting, race, the justice system, and gender dynamics lack depth and, in a piece of literary fiction, that is typically a death blow.

      All of that being said, if Chan publishes another book, I'd probably still read it because I think that she has a lot of potential as a writer.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Feels like a spin- off the handmaid's tale from wife perspective. Imagine a wife from the handmaid's tale gets her baby and in a poor lapse in judgement, mistreats her baby. Then the systematic mind bending punishment she would be forced to endure for not being Perfect Mother.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I have never read a more depressing book. I couldn’t stop listening even when I wanted to.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 2/5
      I kept expecting some excitement and upheaval from the main character, but she was essentially a passive observer in her own story. This book is a laundry list of events with no journey or plot.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Such a depressing drag. Have no idea why this was recommended as a bookclub pick.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Was interesting all the way to the end!! Would recommend it to friends.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      So incredibly sad. This book was harsh on the spirit, so many disappointments and tragedies. But I also felt inspired to cherish every precious second with my children. I’m glad I listened to it because I feel my motherhood more deeply and reassure myself that I am NOT a bad mother, but I am also learning to be better.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      It was ok kinda of weird and very emotional. Still a good read

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      The story had so much promise, so much potential. But it turned into a cliched, clinical story with an ending that was… not really an ending at all? It could’ve used an epilogue or follow up. It just ended so abruptly. I almost quit at one point, but I was already 3/5 of the way done and pushed through.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      It was a really interesting book, I got frustrated on several different occasions because of how much it mimicked real like and how they actually treat Black and Brown people in the system. But overall really enjoyed it. Oh, I hated the ending. It would have been nice to have a happy ending. Did I give that away...

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Quite possibly the worst book I’ve read. The story line was good but without giving anything away I just didn’t like it

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A very good, but devastating read. I am about to have a baby and this isn’t what I expected going into it, but it is something I would recommend to the people I think could stomach it. Just very raw and heartbreaking, but I still liked it!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Such an interesting book. This was a mix of Handmaid’s Tale and A.I. and had me feeling so many emotions - anger, discomfort, anxiousness, sadness.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Handmaid’s Tale meets Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep meets family drama.

      I have a young child so the commentary on how mothers are treated definitely hit home but I think the more poignant element was the commentary on CPS and the statement that the system was being revamped to eliminate bias. This book is maddening and not as far from reality for some mothers as some readers seem to believe. The injustice of having your child taken away permanently due to “one very bad day” and the irony of telling a mother that her child can’t be in her life due to the trauma of the incident when the process following was causing far more trauma. Trying to wrench her daughter from her arms because they need to play to be evaluated and having her attitude toward the social worker held against her were painful. This whole book was painful!

      The choices made regarding the protagonist’s offense was brilliant. Leaving her daughter alone was something most parents these days would not do, and her little one was awake and able to know that she had been left alone and was incredibly upset but, at the same time, the dangers that they cited were arbitrary and the reaction that the child would be permanently traumatized due to having her cries go unanswered juxtaposed to the fact that her coparents were sleep training which often advises leaving the little one to cry unanswered in the early days.

      I felt like Chan did not spell everything out for the reader and there were some elements of dystopian lot that she chose not to incorporate in the book (no commander’s speech for example) that leave a lot of uncomfortable questions but I as an avid reader of dystopian lot I was delighted to have this depressing read and really appreciate the exploration of the anxiety of motherhood, complications of raising a multi racial & multi cultural family, unfairness of standards for parents after making mistakes with their children, unfairness of the standards of parenting based on gender and many more threads left hanging for the reader to consider and grapple with alone.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Hm, interesting book, but sad. Don't expect a happy thing from this book. Utopian world. As a mother, it just made me sad.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      It was too much, the system was too strict just for a small mistake. Redemption didn't seem likely

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The writing was excellent. The story was disturbing…..it cuts a bit close to the bone about motherhood and our own limits, beliefs about ourselves, and in an exaggerated way makes you wonder about a war in women.
    • 3/5
      Esperaba algo más de este libro. Llega a ser un poco repetitivo en varias ocasiones, además que pienso que deberían haber explicado mejor la forma en que calificaban en la escuela.
    • 4/5
      Wow... I don't know where to begin!
      This is brutal science fiction, starting with: it doesn't seem so unreal.
      It shows that even our current day standards regarding the impossibly high standards we have for mothers, how much we, as a society, exact from them, do not really apply for dads, a simple: he is here and kid is not dead nor broken is sufficient to dub them good dads.
      It shows, in a NOT so exaggerated manner, how misogynistic our society is, how everything gets turned around when we perceive a mother has not done everything but die for her children, how we as women, are only defined by our motherly prowess.
      It is heartbreaking, stressful and incredibly maddening.
      I totally recommend it.
    • 4/5
      The book is a little depressing. The most interesting part is the relationship she forms with her doll Enmanuel.
    • 1/5
      I tried starting this book multiple times but it's just so slow and monotonous that I just could not get into it.
    • 2/5
      Interesting but an unrelentingly cruel and hateful book: mean-spirited injustice-porn
    • 4/5
      The beginning was hard for me to get into, a little uninteresting but a little before the halfway point the plot really picks up. Stayed up really late to finish it because I had to know what happened. It's pretty obvious to guess the ending, but I don't think that taints the story. I loved everything about the "dolls''. I'd really like to know more about them and wished that they had something to do with the ending but I was still satisfied with the book and its conclusion. 4/5
    • 4/5
      What starts out as a book about an antihero looking for redemption, quickly turns to a dystopian nightmare that feels cut from the same red cloth of the Handmaiden's Tale. Although it can be equal parts harrowing and heartbreaking, this book is an interesting read and worth the time.
    • 4/5
      This book made me so uncomfortable. It got close to home, being a mother. This world of fiction didn't feel too far fetched. I only gave it 4 stars because the adio narrator of the book was hard to listen to.
    • 5/5
      Gutting. A brilliant commentary that’s not so far fetched in today’s political climate of Neighbor reporting Neighbor. Multiple layers in this exquisitely written dystopian novel.
    • 2/5
      I don't know how to feel. What lesson is it teaching.
    • 3/5
      This book frustrated me. It was a good story plot, yes. What frustrated me was the fact that these women obviously had mental health issues, ie post partum. The school made them out to be monsters and didn't really 'help' them.
      I guess it gets you thinking, that's a good thing.