Headline, January 31 2022/ ''' '' GOOD MOTHERS GOSH '' '''

''' '' GOOD MOTHERS

 GOSH '' '''

'' O' GREAT MOTHERS OF THE WORLD - SO GREAT HONOURS SAY :

Your Highnesses and Excelliencies all :

QUEEN ELIZABETH, Dr. Jill Biden, PM Jacinda Ardern, Angela Merkel, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, Samina Alvi, Rosalyn Carter, Peng Liyuan, Hillary Clinton, Michele Obama, Sajida Sultab Abbasi, Naseem Akhter, Shamim Akhter and Khadija Khan, Anis Fatima, Surriya Malik Nawaz.. And on and on I can go.

All Great Mothers - be rest assured that The World Students Society will be covering more and more names, as soon as possible.

MAY ALMIGHTY GOD bless all the mothers of the world. JOIN The World Students Society. Welcome to The World Students Society - for every subject in the world.

SURPRISE - SURPRISE : THE FIRST GLOBAL ELECTIONS on The World Students Society, will be the greatest of honours to elect Mothers to global offices and committees. Great and new world can only be built with Great Mothers in power and influence and oversight.

THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD MOTHERS : The World Students Society - for every subject in the world.

The '' wrongfully accused person '' plot is terrifying because it dramatizes two extremely common scenarios : being misunderstood and being ignored. At the heart of every movie like  '' The 39 Steps '' or books like '' The Count of Monte Cristo '' is a guy protesting that the world has gotten it all wrong, and if everyone would just listen to him for one second........

Jessamine Chan's debut novel, '' The School for Good Mothers, '' is a crafty and spellbinding twist on this genre.

Frida Liu is a 39-year-old single mother with a respectable but a dull job at the University of Pennsylvania and an 18-month-old daughter, Harriet. In a spell of insomnia-induced-irrationality, Frida leaves home alone for two hours and is hauled into police custody for child abandonment.

The accusation isn't technically wrong; she really did leave Harriet unattended. The problem is that when Freda tries to repent, every word and gesture of her subsequent innocent behavior is interpreted by the authorities as evidence of depravity.

A period of surveillance follows that abandonment. Men from Child Protective Services install cameras in every room of Frida's home except the bathroom; her calls and texts are monitored and analyzed. When she asks why a court-appointed psychologist is filming their session, she is admonished for being paranoid.

When she admits that isn't raising Hariet to be bilingual - Frida's parents are Chinese - a social worker asks why Frida is ''denying Harriet a crucial part of heritage.'' When she hugs Harriet after a supervised visit, she receives a lecture about '' boundaries. '' Frida's lawyer advises her not to confide in parents or friends or co-workers. Anyone could be an informant.

At a court hearing, a judge reviews the evidence of Frida's misbehavior and places Harriet in the custody of Frida's ex-husband.

As for the bad mother herself, she is sentenced to one year at an experimental rehab facility where the tiniest infraction - a stolen puff on a cigarette, an illicit glug of beer - can lead to permanent termination of parental rights. At the rehab, the broccoli is soggy, the underwear is government issued and the cameras are everywhere.

 ''This isn't a woman's prison,'' Frida tells herself, marching in boots and a jumpsuit to her mandatory parenting class. Sure, there are guards and an electrified fence and you can't leave and the sound of women crying, is so common it registers as white noise, but it's not a prison. [ It's a prison! ]

The crimes of the other mothers include letting a kid play alone in the backyard, inadequately childproofing an apartment, testing positive for marijuana use [ the mom, not the kid] and ''coddling,'' which is considered '' a subset of emotional abuse.'' 

Each woman is issued a robotic child with whom she must practice her parenting skills, such as hugging for an appropriate time, maintaining unbroken eye contact and kissing and kissing cheeks and foreheads but never lips [too ''Europens''].

The robots are powered by foul-smelling blue goo. Like real children, they eat and cry and vomit. Unlike real children, they harvest and transmit data about their assigned mommies back to the prison instructors.

This data reveals that Frida's kisses '' lack a fiery core of maternal love.'' Frida wishes she could tell the instructors to kiss her fiery core, but there's no point; it would be just another shovelful of dirt from the grave she's haplessly digging.

But Chan's novel is too original to come off as a puree of influences. She renders Frida's cornered-animal consciousness in clipped and twitchy prose so effective that I had to pause every few pages to unclench my fists.

At rehab, Frida is taught that she has committed a sin not of parenting but of ontology: In conceiving of herself as a daughter, lover, employee and citizen rather than mother alone, she has violated a new code of maternal ethics.

The corrective action she must take, then, is to slaughter all superfluous selves.

Chan's ideas are livid, but her prose is cool in temperature, and the effect is of an extended-release drug that doesn't peak until long after you've swallowed it. One test of speculative fiction is whether or not it gives you nightmares, and when mine came - I knew they would - it was a full week after I'd finished this time bomb of a book.

'' This is a safe space, ladies,'' a faceless captor was telling me in my sleep. Terrifying.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Great Mothers and Times, and Writings continues. The World Students Society honors ' The School for Good Mothers,'' by Jessamine Chan, a masterpiece. The World Students Society thanks review author Molly Young.

With most respectful dedication to all the Mothers of the world. And then Students, Professors and Teachers. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - E-!WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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