The School For Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan

There is a lot going on here in terms of social commentary in the guise of dystopian fiction. It is The Handmaid's Tale meets Rosemary's Baby. Frida has found herself a single mother about the same time she gave birth to Harriet. Her philandering husband left her, and she is just not a natural at parenting. The novel opens with her exhausted and sleep-deprived, leaving Harriet in a bouncy chair to go for a cup of coffee and coming home to find CPS taking her child away because she endangered her child. After two months of in-home surveillance, observation by a social worker, and evaluation by a psychiatrist, Frida is still judged insufficiently trustworthy. To have any chance of reclaiming joint custody of Harriet, she must submit to a one-year residential program in parenting--which has, of course, different standards for mothers than fathers. At orientation, they’re told that mothers who quit or end up speaking badly about the program not only lose all parental rights, they are also entered into a registry equivalent to that used for pedophiles. The fence around the campus is electrified, a sort of parenting prison. The nightmare is complete when the mothers are introduced to the AI robot dolls that will serve as their practice children and will record the women’s every pulse rate, eye movement, grip pressure, and response time, ensuring the scientific accuracy of their evaluations. The goal is complete control of women to become robots themselves. The book, which I read on the eve of women losing countless rights in the United States, touches on so many of the issues associated with misogyny: race, class, culture, age, sexual orientation.