“Mother knows best” is taken to the extreme in XiXi Tian’s debut adult novel, exploring the claustrophobia of new motherhood, the weight of generational trauma, and the paper-thin line between care and control and love and harm.

Jenny Huang is alone. She’s alone when she gives birth to her newborn daughter, Opal. She’s alone when they come back home to her New York City apartment. And she’s alone when her mother, who has been missing for years, unexpectedly appears at her door.

Mama says she’s here to help Jenny with the "sitting month," or zuò yuè zi, the traditional Chinese confinement period that follows the first 40 days after giving birth. The timing is eerily convenient, but Jenny is too desperate to help to ask questions while Mama cleans, insists Jenny rests, and most importantly, prepares delicious home-cooked meals, even as she enforces the rules of zuò yuè zi with unnerving rigidity: no reading, no bathing, no phone, and no outside contact.

When Jenny and Mama fall back into their familiar mother-daughter hostilities, something about her mother's sudden return, and strict adherence to ritual, begins to feel increasingly sinister. For the first time in her life, Jenny considers disobeying her mother. But there are consequences to not following the rules during the sitting month, and Jenny begins to question who she's really living with as the furniture moves around, hives appear on her body, and she wakes up to her own bloodied fingernails with no memory of what happened. She wants to be a “good mother” and follow the rules, but she begins to wonder: Is there anything more horrifying than motherhood?