Ithaca's cooperatively-owned independent bookstore since 2011
215 N Cayuga Street Dewitt Mall · Ithaca, NY · 607-273-8246
About the Reading Widely Book Club
The Reading Widely Book Club chooses books to expand our reading as widely as possible. Each month a knowledgeable community member will join us for our book club conversations. Book club books are always 10% off.
About the Book
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 eye 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 judgement, 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.
About the Conversation Partner
Chris Holmes is an associate professor and chair of Literatures in English at Ithaca College and has been working there since 2011. He is the co-director, with novelist Eleanor Henderson, of Ithaca's New Voices Festival, a three-day celebration of talented, early career writers. He received his PhD from Brown University in 2012 and was awarded with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching, a distinction given to one graduate student at the university each academic year. His specialties in literature includes postcolonial and anglophone Literature and theories of translation and world literature. Holmes's book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is currently under contract with Bloomsbury Press.