The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
As you all probably know by now, I only read YA fiction occasionally, and sometimes it is simply the result of not realizing until I’m in the middle of a book! But no so with The Hate U Give. I have been seeing Thomas’s work for a while now, and decided to give it a read. Starr is a teenager who is witness to her friend’s murder by the police, and the following days and weeks see her and her community deciding how to deal with the trauma. “The Hate U Give” was published in 2017, which is interesting considering it directly foreshadows the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Thomas’s novel was both serious and soft; I loved seeing the intimate details of this family and the pure love and caring they have for one another. I look forward to reading more of Thomas’s work, and maybe even watching the film that was released in 2018.
The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan
The School for Good Mothers follows Frida, the mother of a not-yet toddler, who has what she calls “a very bad day” that leads to her losing custody of her daughter, Harriet. What follows is a dystopian series of events in which Frida tries without fail to regain custody, which exposes not only the double standards society thrusts upon women – especially mothers – but also the hypocrisy of fathers being given the same or better treatment within a system in which they do nearly none of the work and almost all of the damage. It is a feat of plot and writing ¬– on purpose, though, I presume – that Frida’s husband’s affair and their subsequent divorce is merely mentioned as an aside throughout, when really her “very bad day” can be traced directly back to her husband’s actions. If he hadn’t had an affair, if he had kept his promises to her, if he had been the father and husband he should have been… but Chan never lets readers go down this road, as Frida, unsurprisingly, takes all the blame on herself, and is indeed forced by the system to take it all upon herself. This novel is a powerful commentary on the state of motherhood today, and its power rests in its hyperbole, and the fact that reality is not really that far away from it.