With the approaching celebration of Mother’s Day, Bookends recommends three contemporary novels that explore the complicated side of motherhood…

The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan

Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough.

Until Frida has a very bad day.

The state has its eye on mothers like Frida. The ones who check their phones, letting their children get injured on the playground; who let their children walk home alone. Because of one moment of poor judgement, a host of government officials will now determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion.

Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that a bad mother can be redeemed. That she can learn to be good.

The Whispers, by Ashley Audrain

On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighbourhood couples and their children gather for a catered barbecue as the summer winds down; drinks continue late into the night.

Everything is great until the picture-perfect hostess explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack — loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. And then, his mother can only sit by her son’s hospital bed, where she refuses to speak to anyone, and his life hangs in the balance.

What happens next, over the course of a tense three days, as each of these women grapple with what led to that terrible night?

Exploring envy, women’s friendships, desire, and the intuitions that we silence,
The Whispers is a chilling novel about the other side of motherhood.

The Mothers, by Brit Bennett

Set within a contemporary black community in Southern California, this is Brit Bennett’s mesmerising first novel, an emotionally perceptive story about community, love, and ambition. Naturally, it begins with a secret.

“All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.”

It is the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, 17-year-old beauty. Mourning her mother’s recent suicide, she takes up with the local pastor’s son. Luke Sheppard is 21, a former football star whose injury has reduced him to waiting tables at a diner. They are young; it’s not serious. But the pregnancy that results from this teen romance — and the subsequent cover-up — will have an impact that goes far beyond their youth. As Nadia hides her secret from everyone, including Aubrey, her God-fearing best friend, the years move quickly. Soon, Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey are full-fledged adults and still living in debt to the choices they made that one seaside summer, caught in a love triangle they must carefully manoeuvre, and dogged by the constant, nagging question: What if they had chosen differently? The possibilities of the road not taken are a relentless haunt.