By Jessamine Chan
Fiction/Hutchinson Heinemann/Paperback/324 pages/$29.95/Buy here
4 out of 5
One bad day is all it takes for Frida Liu to lose her daughter.
Frida, 39, a sleep-deprived single mother in Philadelphia, the United States, heads into her office to pick up a file. To do so, she leaves her baby Harriet alone at home.
This sets off a terrible chain of events, culminating in Frida being sent to a state-run institution for errant mothers, where she will have to pass a barrage of tests. If she quits or fails, she will be legally banned from seeing Harriet again.
American author Jessamine Chan’s debut novel lays out a mother’s nightmare that, despite its dystopian trappings, is all too believably immediate.
