Alex Peake-Tomkinson

The parent snatchers: The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan, reviewed

A sinister child protection agency seizes and imprisons supposedly neglectful mothers and dictates childcare mantras with the use of robotic dolls

Robotic dolls feature in Jessamine Chan’s disturbing novel about child protection. [Getty Images] 
issue 02 April 2022
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  • The School for Good Mothers

    Jessamine Chan

    Hutchinson Heinemann, pp. 336, £12

Frida Liu, the 39-year-old mother of a toddler named Harriet, has a very bad day which will haunt her for the length of this novel. She is divorced from Harriet’s father, a middle-aged man called Gust who has left her for a 28-year-old Pilates instructor called Susanna. Harriet will only fall asleep, Frida explains, ‘if I’m holding her hand’.

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