The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan

Not sure why I thought this would be a fun, light, airplane read, but ooof. It kind of destroyed me. It’s a terrific book — and it is fast-paced and absorbing — but it’s also tough, emotionally. It’s a real deep dive into some of the more difficult parts of parenting — particularly the balance between your own desires and your child’s needs, and that frantic, imprisoned feeling you get when attending to a largely helpless but extremely needy and opinionated being. It’s really interesting, how it manages matters of relatability/empathy/moral judgment — in part because many scenes that stage the question are in a context of considering how one can be trained to cultivate such skills (or forced to comply), often in dialogue with a non-human interlocutor. Really a brilliant novel; one that will haunt me for a long time.