The Booker Bookies book club at the Ipswich Public Library welcomes those with a love (whether blossoming or cultivated) for English literature, especially recognizable works of literary fiction published in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The selections for Booker Bookies are fiction titles that have either won/been nominated for the Booker Prize or are other critically acclaimed works of literary fiction. Booker Prize entries are often literature that feature diverse and challenging stories, characters, and settings. Book club members should be prepared to read and discuss novels that may feature mature content.

Registration required. Please email Stephen Lajoie at slajoie@ipswichlibrary.org if you have any questions.

June's book is The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan. Copies will be available at the Main Desk for checkout.

About the book: 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. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic 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 eyes 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 judgment, 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. A searing page-turner that is also a transgressive novel of ideas about the perils of “perfect” upper-middle class parenting; the violence enacted upon women by both the state and, at times, one another; the systems that separate families; and the boundlessness of love, The School for Good Mothers introduces, in Frida, an everywoman for the ages. Using dark wit to explore the pains and joys of the deepest ties that bind us, Chan has written a modern literary classic. (336 pages)