SUCH A GOOD MOTHER

Danger and chaos ensue when a financially struggling British mother sends her child to an elite elementary school in their up-and-coming neighborhood.

Despite the school’s obvious flaws—which mostly center around the dangerously competitive nature of the other parents—Rose O’Connell, a junior bank teller with a haunted past, is determined to send her son to the Woolf Academy, where children are molded for success from a very young age. Considering that Rose went to the same school back when it was a regular public high school in a seedy neighborhood and she was known as the daughter of an infamous con man, this seems like an effort to overcome the ghosts of her traumatic teenage years, which come up frequently. These same issues compel Rose to obsess over fitting into the circle of mothers who rule the school, which is the main conflict driving the plot. Though Rose’s psychological motivations are clear, it can be hard to stomach her need to fit in with these intolerable women. Rose herself is hard to like, with her oppressive insecurity and overpowering naïveté in regard to social norms and life in general. Her marriage is in trouble, and she’s hardly making ends meet, but all she seems to care about is getting those other mothers to like her. The stakes never feel high enough, and despite some twists and turns, the book lacks thrills. There’s nothing shocking about people with money battling for power, even if it involves schoolchildren, nor is school choice a matter of life and death. Though the desire to give one’s children every opportunity for success is understandable, Rose would have been better off sending her son somewhere else and saving herself the trouble.

Less a story about motherhood than a lesson about how grade school politics can last into adulthood.