Review: The Teacher by Freida McFadden (#20BooksofSummer 2024)

If you’ve dipped your toes into the recommendations of book bloggers, the novels of Freida McFadden keep getting a strong recommendation for fans of mysteries and thrillers. So, for my 2024 #20BooksofSummer, I decided I’d see what all the buzz was about. I downloaded McFadden’s latest novel The Teacher and was quickly drawn into a world of high drama and unreliable narrators.

Give McFadden credit — The Teacher starts with a great hook of a first-person, unidentified narrator digging a grave to hide a body and potentially being caught. The story then jumps back in time to fill in the details that led to the need for a grave in the first place, all while giving us a plethora of potential suspects.

Told in alternating viewpoints of Eve, the tough-as-nails math teacher with a fetish for expensive shoes who is trapped in a seemingly loveless marriage to the popular English teacher, Nate, and Addie, a troubled and outcast student who has a few secrets including why a male teacher got terminated last year and the circumstances surrounding her father’s death, The Teacher barrels along at a breathless clip as each unreliable narrator offers pieces of the puzzle. It took me long to suspect neither is being entirely honest with us and only revealing the truth as she sees it when necessary for the plot.

And yet, the farther I delved into the story and the quicker the revelations started to pile up, the less satisfying they became. But somehow I couldn’t look away from the trainwreck as it barreled toward its inevitable conclusion.

The Teacher is the ultimate summer read, designed to hook you just enough to keep those pages turning but not distract you so much that you can’t look up every once in a while to make sure you’re not getting sunburned or don’t need to reapply that sunscreen. The book had me hooked until a couple of reveals took me from willing suspension of disbelief to rolling my eyes and asking, “So, that’s where this is going?!? Really?!?”

I’m going to get into some SPOILERS for the book here. If you don’t want to know, turn back now.

So, turns out Eve is having an affair with a guy who (wait for it) works in a shoe store. And keeps having to leave her to run home to his family. This sets up what the novel wants to be its biggest twist, which is so incredibly eye-rolling inducing that it undermined much of the faith I’d had in McFadden as a storyteller.

Addie has a few secrets of her own, that she supplies as the novel unfolds. She used to be best friends with Hudson, until her alcoholic father came home and assumed they were more than friends. This led to the father getting pushed down the stairs and becoming unalive. Neither Addie nor Hudson has ever confessed this to anyone, instead letting others find the dad. Needless to say, they’re estranged now, not sure how to deal with this huge secret. The older teacher who got fired tried to help Addie as she withdrew and got fired when Addie went a bit obsessive stalker on him. And now, Addie’s having an affair with Nate, the sensitive English teacher poet, who is also married to Eve.

Part of what drives the narrative is wondering which of these various people will be the body in the grave dug in the first chapter. There are a LOT of potential suspects and victims — especially as you realize that Nate is manipulating Addie.

And yet somehow, the final quarter of the novel goes even more bananas as one twist after the next is piled on — all leading to a final twist that made me say, “No, really?!?” when I read it. The final quarter of the story raises a lot of questions — and not in a good way. I can’t help but feel like McFadden was piling on twists for the sake of twists and not concerned if said twists were adequately set-up or believable.

It leads to my assertion that my taste in stories is different than a lot of the online reviewers who were apparently lapping this up with a spoon. I will admit that the first third of the novel was intriguing enough that I’m willing to try another McFadden novel, but I’m not necessarily in a rush to get to it.