![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book completed
Dec. 27th, 2022 03:55 amThe School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan. It’s a dystopian novel about what could happen if Child Protective Services goes bonkers. Our protagonist (who is really not very likeable) has what she calls a “really bad day” and has a rather appalling lapse in judgment while caring for her toddler daughter. The child is mildly traumatized but not harmed, and then the rest of the book is about the horrible fourteen months or so that the mom spends hoping to regain access to her daughter. ( Spoil about the part of the book that came as a surprise to me ) It was interesting, and bits were quite entertaining, but I would have preferred either a more sympathetic protagonist, or a better message than “government is bad,” or both.
One of the things I liked most about the book was the way the protagonists’ Chinese-American heritage tended to compound many of her problems. Her mother’s own style of parenting was not ideal, by the standards this training system wanted, but it made sense, given the circumstances. And the protagonist’s reactions to her own childhood, and to being Asian-American, were worthwhile – but the reader’s awareness of this side of the story may be diluted by the overall dystopia.
This is the book that I didn’t want to read on Christmas, though it’s due back at the library this week, and once I started it today I made a point to read the whole thing so that I could move past it, rather than committing my imagination to living in the world for any longer. I’m kind of impressed that the author could do that to herself. I would not have wanted to live in this woman’s head and situation for all the months it surely took her to get the book written.
One of the things I liked most about the book was the way the protagonists’ Chinese-American heritage tended to compound many of her problems. Her mother’s own style of parenting was not ideal, by the standards this training system wanted, but it made sense, given the circumstances. And the protagonist’s reactions to her own childhood, and to being Asian-American, were worthwhile – but the reader’s awareness of this side of the story may be diluted by the overall dystopia.
This is the book that I didn’t want to read on Christmas, though it’s due back at the library this week, and once I started it today I made a point to read the whole thing so that I could move past it, rather than committing my imagination to living in the world for any longer. I’m kind of impressed that the author could do that to herself. I would not have wanted to live in this woman’s head and situation for all the months it surely took her to get the book written.