Dystopia Is All Too Plausible in The School for Good Mothers

Jessamine Chan's debut novel, The School for Good Mothers, is not a domestic manual on keeping house. Nor is it the sort of slog that might make tidying look like an appealing alternative. Yet as I read it over the course of one snowy evening, I repeatedly put it down to complete household tasks normally ignored until morning. Every last sock met its match. This book is a horror story so potent it will fill even the most diligent parent with an itchy impulse to panic-clean, to straighten up, to act like someone's watching.