The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

 genre: dystopian

Being a mother is so exhausting.  When Frida has a Very Bad Day and leaves her toddler daughter Harriett at home while she runs an errand, she has no idea that her desperate need for alone time will result in Frida being removed from public life and given to the state to be taught how to be a better mother.  Being Asian-American and the trauma she carries from her early years of being bullied and racially harassed only makes the transition to mothering school more challenging.  Can Frida learn enough to deserve to be reunited with Harriett?

The idea of this fascinated me and, in some ways, it lived up to what I'd thought it would be.  It takes our obsession with parenting and, particularly, mothering to the nth degree - picking apart the minutia of what we do as caregivers and behaving as though if only WE mothers were good enough, EVERYTHING would turn out fine.  All the weight of all the choices of all the children is on the shoulders of the moms - if only we could figure out how to handle this burden well!  It's aggravating to read sometimes because Frida is in an impossible situation, but it's still intriguing to imagine how science might try and "measure" mothering.  It's painful, obviously - to think about what happens to a group of women whose children have been taken away from them, the trauma of that alone is so disturbing.  It's a little repetitive and went on a tiny bit too long for me but it really made me think and I was always interested in picking it up.