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An alternate cover edition of ISBN 9781982156121 can be found here. In this taut and explosive debut novel, one lapse in judgement lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance. Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. What’s worse is she can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with their angelic daughter Harriet does Frida finally feel she’s attained the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she’s just enough. Until Frida has a horrible day. The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida — ones who check their phones while their kids are on the playground; who let their children walk home alone; in other words, mothers who only have one lapse of judgement. Now, a host of government officials will 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 she can live up to the standards set for mothers — that she can learn to be good. This propulsive, witty page-turner explores the perils of “perfect” upper-middle-class parenting, the violence enacted upon women by the state and each other, and the boundless love a mother has for her daughter.
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I will admit that I’m willing to slog through a book I might otherwise DNF if it was written by a female author, particularly an Asian-American one, but I persevered through this one because it felt like the author didn’t know what point she was trying to make, and I wanted to see if the thread of the story ever solidified. Other reviewers have already covered the dystopian, Big Brother-esque surveillance of mothers, but I want to talk about the main character’s relationship to her own racial identity. Frida is the classic daughter-of-Asian-immigrants who has spent her entire life in white spaces; at some point, she muses on her overwhelmingly white dating history, but then concludes that her experiences with overly-demanding Asian exes pushed her towards white men… which is A) a weird leap of logic and B) never touched on further. I would have liked a bit more introspection on the protagonist’s part, but the book largely positions her as a victim of her circumstances, which seems to take her off the hook for her actual bad takes and wrongdoings.