It’s Sunday again and I picked up yet another Freida Mcfadden.
‘The Teacher’ is the author’s first release of the year and like her previous works , this one is also an edge-of-the-seat popcorn thriller. Eve Bennett is the Maths teacher at the local high school, Caseham High. She has a beautiful house, a fulfilling career and a super handsome husband, Nathaniel Bennett. All is as it should be. But it’s then Caseham high is rocked by a scandal involving a student teacher affair, with one student, Addie Severson , at it’s centre. The teacher involved in the scandal is disgraced and leaves the school and Addie joins the class tutored by Eve. But Eve’s real problem starts when she realizes that the troubled kid is also assigned to her husband, Nat for teaching English.
Devoid of too many characters and too many perspectives over crowding and confusing the narrative , ‘The Teacher’ is a really engaging thriller. Besides Eve, Nat and Addie, there are only a handful of characters- (the school bully – Kenzie and her boy friend, Hudson being the most significant of the lot) and this works to it’s advantage as the readers are hooked to the lives of Eve and Addie for the most part.
The twists are hard to predict and just as you believe that you have figured out the ending , Frieda pulls the rug out from under your feet with a really surprising plot twist making this one a really addictive thriller.
Though this pop corn read doesn’t break any new grounds in terms of suspense, full credits to the writer for smartly using even the most conventional narrative tropes to her advantage. For instance, there is a brief portion in the book where the character of Eve, goes missing and at this point, the book could have easily fallen into the regular run-of-the-mill thriller zone, but Mcfadden doesn’t take the easier route there and the readers are rewarded with one brilliant twist after the other from there on. There is a double twist happening towards the end and though I liked the first one (the one involving Eve’s past), I didn’t like the epilogue one (the age time lines confused me there) and I believe Freida could have easily done away with the latter.
On the whole, ‘The Teacher’ is a paisa vasool pop-corn thriller and I am pretty sure that someone will make a film adaptation of this one soon!
-nikhimenon
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