The School for Good Mothers

A timely and remarkable debut.

Carmen Maria Machado, author of HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES

Heartbreaking and daring, propulsive and wise. I read it with my heart in my throat and I held my kids tight.

Diane Cook, author of the Booker Prize finalist THE NEW WILDERNESS

Jessamine Chan captures, in heartbreaking tones, the exacting price women pay in a patriarchal society that despises them, that reduces their worth to their viability for procreation and capacity for mothering. The School for Good Mothers is not so much a warning for some possible dystopian nightmare as much as it is an alarm announcing that the nightmare is here. The book is, thus, a weeping testimony, a haunting song, and a piercing rebuke of both the misogynist social order and the traps it lays for women, girls, and femmes. Good Mothers deserves an honored place next to the works of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler.

Robert Jones, Jr., author of THE PROPHETS and creator of Son of Baldwin

This book is like nothing I've read before. Haunting and unforgettable, and I'm in awe of Jessamine Chan's mind.

Liz Moore, author of LONG BRIGHT RIVER and HEFT

This taut, explosive novel is all the more terrifying because it edges so close to reality. Frida's predicament embodies the fraught question so many women are taught to ask: Am I good enough?

Leni Zumas, author of RED CLOCKS