In Laura Best’s first novel for adults, it is 1960. Young mother Elizabeth MacKay lives with her husband Cliff, daughter Jewel and son Jacob in the farming community of The Forties, in Nova Scotia. Everything should be fine. Her children are happy and healthy. The farm is doing well. But all is not well with Elizabeth, who is losing her grip on reality. Suffering from paranoid delusions, she is afraid of harming her children. She’s been prescribed medication to regulate her moods, but she doesn’t know who to trust and refuses to take the pills. One day, to keep her children safe from the threat she poses, she leaves the house and spends the night in the forest. We next encounter Elizabeth in 1975. She is living in a group home where she is in the latter stages of recovery from the mental illness that brought her life to an abrupt halt. Like the other residents in the home, she is making a careful re-entry into society. But Elizabeth’s trauma is deep and profound. Years of medication and electro-shock therapy have not just rendered her docile and compliant, but also wiped her mind clean (one of the other residents of the home calls her a “cardboard dummy”). She has no memory of who she was before all this happened, no recollection of family or friends. But the memories are starting to return, and when she encounters a clerk at the local Frenchy’s wearing a nametag that says JEWEL, some of the fragments start to fall into place. The remainder of the novel chronicles Elizabeth’s slow and tortuous journey back into her past as she tries, despite misgivings, to recover the lost memories, and searches for the person she used to be and anyone who might remember her. In Good Mothers Don’t, Laura Best has written a poignant, quietly gripping novel that tells of the devastating effects that mental illness has on people’s lives. The onset of Elizabeth’s illness—her terror and feelings of helplessness—is rendered with heart-rending empathy; her volatile state of mind and irrational fears are vividly depicted. Especially persuasive and tragic is Best’s portrayal of the shame and confusion with which Elizabeth’s family and the people of The Forties respond to her illness: their willingness to erase her from the collective consciousness once she is removed from their midst. In the end it is Elizabeth’s perseverance and determined spirit that makes it possible for her to reconnect with a world that left her for dead and begin the process of reassembling her shattered life. ( )