THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD MOTHERS by Jessamine Chan

Frida Liu has a “very bad day” and leaves her eighteen-month-old daughter home alone for two and a half hours.  As a result, she must spend a year at the School for Good Mothers, which is actually a school for bad mothers who need to become good mothers.  The beginning of the book, before Frida enters the school, is tense and suspenseful, but her time at the school involves too much angst and hand-wringing.  The students are assigned a robotic doll, reminiscent of the artificial friend in Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, who has human-like capabilities.  Frida names hers Emmanuelle, which the doll struggles to pronounce.  Frida and Emmanuelle are a team in the quest for Frida’s parental rights being restored.  Their practice sessions include subjects such as stranger/danger and empathy for those less fortunate, but Emmanuelle initially sees a homeless person as stranger/danger, not as someone in need.  I like the idea and originality of this novel more than its actual substance.  Eventually, the author paints herself into a corner with Frida’s many failings--with only one way out.

THE RABBIT HUTCH by Tess Gunty

Vacca Vale is a fictitious Indiana city that was once a thriving industrial metropolis.  Now it is dying, and developers plan to demolish a sizeable greenspace.  The title of the book refers to an affordable housing apartment complex in which most of the characters reside.  There are rabbits in the story as well, not to mention in the somewhat disturbing epigraph.  Blandine is an exceptionally bright and beautiful young woman who has aged out of the foster system, as have her three male teenaged roommates whose moral compasses are seriously skewed.  Blandine’s personal mission is to stop the developers by peppering them with voodoo dolls and whatnot.  One oddball character who sweeps in from California is the son of a famous but now deceased actress.  He likes to paint his almost naked body with the liquid from glow sticks and then barge into the home of someone with whom he has a bone to pick.  At first, I found the storyline depressing and not exactly cohesive, but then I laughed out loud occasionally.  Overall, though, I would say that this book is a bit dark—about a depressed city and its unfortunate denizens.  In a long and seemingly unrelated section of the book, gifted high school student Tiffany becomes romantically involved with a 42-year-old married teacher.  Her connection to the Rabbit Hutch comes not so much as a surprise as a confirmation of what the author has led us to suspect.  Here’s my favorite passage from that section:

“It’s clear to her that he would be happier in a coastal city.  It’s clear to him that she would be happier in a different species.”

I hope that species is not rabbits.

THE HERO OF THIS BOOK by Elizabeth McCracken

Whether or not I like an author depends a lot on which of their books I read first.  In the case of Elizabeth McCracken, I loved The Giant’s House, but if I had read Niagara Falls All Over Again or Bowlaway first, I probably would not still be reading her books.  This book, however, is another winner for me.  Marketed as a novel, it’s mostly a memoir and totally a paean to the author’s beloved but now deceased mother.  The first-person narrator is in London visiting, contemplating and commenting on various sites she had visited with her mother or would have liked to.  Her mother had mobility issues her entire life, due to cerebral palsy—a diagnosis that the narrator/daughter was not aware of until she became an adult.  The prose here is smart, funny, and touching, but if you’re looking for a meaty plot, don’t expect to find one here.  The narrator also reflects on the craft of writing and insists that a character’s physical characteristics be described.  I couldn’t agree more.  I always find it frustrating if I cannot picture a character in my mind.  In this case, the author describes her mother quite vividly, including her diminutive stature and her eyebrows, “which were like nobody else’s.”  Oddly enough, I did not find the narrator’s mother to be all that endearing.  Even the narrator owns up to some of her mother’s faults.  Both of the narrator’s parents where hoarders, and her mother was unwilling to part with even one of four waffle irons that she never used.  The narrator admits that she and her mother were both terrible at managing money, but the narrator did discover after her mother’s death that her mother had financial resources that her mother never tapped, because she did not know they existed.  For someone obviously so intelligent, this lapse just baffles me.

TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett

Lara and her husband Joe own a Michigan cherry orchard, and all three of their adult daughters are at home helping out during the Covid lockdown.  It’s the perfect time for Lara to share the story of her brief career as an actress and her involvement with an actor named Peter Duke who became a movie star.  The rapt attention of her three daughters eggs Lara on, starting with her unplanned audition for the role of Emily in her high school’s production of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town.  She goes on to play Emily in two other venues, and the final production is the one in which she meets Peter Duke, referred to simply as Duke throughout this book, who plays her father.  Lara so thoroughly embodies the Emily of the play, that the cast and crew call her Emily, which is also the name of her oldest daughter.  Two characters with essentially the same name occasionally caused me some mild confusion in distinguishing between the past and the present or the mother and the daughter, but not to a degree that detracted from my enjoyment of the story.  The real questions that we readers wanted answered were why she gave up acting, why did she break up with Duke, and how did she meet Joe.  The answers to all of these questions are unexpected.  This is just a delightful and beautifully written story of family and the regrettable mistakes we made when we were young.  Lara’s mistakes are myriad and embarrassing, often reflective of poor judgment, but they all lead to the contentment that she now enjoys.