The School for Good Mothers Jessamine Chan,

“We have your daughter.” So starts Jessamine Chan’s engrossing dystopian drama. Frida Liu is driving back from work when she picks up the message that summons her to the police station. It’s a call that would strike fear into the heart of any parent and for Frida kickstarts a terrifying spiral of repercussions.

Quickly we discover that her 18-month-old daughter, Harriet, was found crying at home alone after a neighbour notified the police. Right from the get-go Frida is treated as a “bad mother” who has failed at the most basic of female requirements. That she was exhausted, working for a demanding boss while minding her daughter; that her husband, Gust, had left her for a younger woman; that she was alone in an unfriendly city struggling financially and emotionally … all this matters little.

Frida had left Harriet safely strapped into the ‘Exersaucer’ contraption while she dashed into the office. She wouldn’t be long. Frida knows she messed up, she’d had “a very bad day” and her punishment unfolds at a startling pace.

Harriet is taken from her, custody given to her husband and his girlfriend. Cameras in her house now monitor her every move and supervised encounters with Harriet are scrutinised. In court she is found guilty of neglect and abandonment. If she submits to a year at an experimental reform school to learn “motherease” she may be reunited with her daughter.

At the school Frida meets other “unfit” mothers, each paired with a robot doll with uncannily human reactions to learn the “Fundamentals of Care and Nurture”.

“When I began this project in 2014, I was consumed with anxiety about whether or not to have a baby,” says author Jessamine. “In the midst of wrestling with my ambivalence, I read an article about a mother fighting to regain custody of her son after leaving him home alone and her nightmarish experience with the family courts. The clinical language used by Child Protective Services, and the keen sense of injustice I felt on that mother’s behalf, lodged in my memory. Mothers are judged even before their babies are born. And those judgements come from everyone. It’s hard to tune out the cultural message that mothers should always be striving to do better.”

The novel’s future world has an aura of possibility and we ache for Frida. Can she make it back to Harriet?