At a moment when state control over women’s bodies (and autonomy) feels ever more chilling, the book feels horrifyingly unbelievable and eerily prescient all at once. The School for Good Mothers (Simon & Schuster) picks up the mantle of writers like Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, with their skin-crawing themes of surveillance, control, and technology but it also stands on its own as a remarkable, propulsive novel. The tool for her forensically monitored progress is an uncanny robot baby, meant to stimulate her, challenge her, and, crucially, record her every movement, from loving gestures to instants of inattention. But no degree of contrition will spare her from the authorities who descend, first removing her child and then transplanting her to an abandoned college campus-turned-dystopian-re-education facility where she will, ostensibly, learn what it truly takes to be a good mother.
It’s a terrible thing to have done, and she knows it. She doesn’t intend to be gone for long, but somehow time slips away, and before she realises it, she’s been gone for hours. Jessamine Chan’s debut-like all truly terrifying nightmares-starts off in a banal, familiar way: an utterly exhausted mother, in a moment of sleep-deprived despair, does the unthinkable (and yet understandable) and walks out of her apartment, leaving her baby behind.
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