This was my first time reading Freida McFadden. She’s so popular that I’m surprised it took me this long. But… There’s always a but… Like Colleen Hoover, I find McFadden’s writing to be a bit simple. The story in interesting enough to get through though, and here we are. By the way, this contains spoilers because I was kind of annoyed by the twist after twist ending. Reader beware.
Protagonist Eve is married to Nate. They are both high school teachers, she in math and he in english. The new school year brings student Addie to both their classrooms. It was rumored that Addie had an affair with a teacher the previous year and that teacher lost his job. Eve hates Addie for it while Nate ends up having an affair with her himself behind his wife’s back. The rub, though, is that Addie didn’t have an affair with a teacher the year before. She did, however, let her alcoholic father die and made her best friend lie about it which causes a rift between them. Eve, too, is having an affair behind her husband’s back. Eventually, Nate uses Addie to get her to attack Eve and bury the body.
This entire book had me guessing, but I was never truly surprised by any of its revelations. Not even the twist reveal in the final pages that meant that Eve’s affair, who we were led to believe was with an adult married man, was really with a student. We find this out from the boy who was also Addie’s best friend. The very thing that Eve hated Nate for, and judged him for, was sleeping with a student. Though the book never explicitly states that Eve knew that her affair was with a high schooler, there is no way she didn’t see him in the halls of her school. No way she didn’t see him with Addie – a high profile student after the rumored affair – at some point. I don’t really believe that Eve did not know that the supposed married man whose wife was always calling during their time together wasn’t really a student. A seventeen year old is not a twenty five year old in any capacity. How could she not have known? This twist has no place in reality and wrecked the entire book for me.
The murder plot where Addie loses her cool and hits Eve over the head only to have Nate reappear and force her to help him bury her could have been plausible if it weren’t for that twist ending. This book was twisty enough – especially when we find out that Addie was just the most recent in a long line of teenage girls Nate slept with – without the whole Eve slept with a student dinger at the end. None of these characters are likable and I had a hard time rooting for them.
I’m just going to say it – because The Housemaid is next in my review pile – Freida McFadden is the M. Night Shyamalan of book writing in the sense that she relies too heavily on the twists in her stories. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t dislike her books or her writing and I do love a good twist. I just find them to be too simply spoken and her writing is for the masses. There’s no real depth to the characters here. They are just unreliable narrators and unlikable people. This could have had something big to say about men who prey on teenage girls, and it almost does, but it falls short by making the murder plot the main story.
I’ll be honest by saying that the reason I picked this up in the first place was I needed something easy after reading The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah which was beautiful and heartbreaking and heavy in the emotion department. The Teacher was certainly easy, probably too easy. While The Nightingale left me thinking about it for weeks, The Teacher left me feeling empty. It says a lot about the writing here.
I’ll get more into how McFadden writes men as villains but manages to fall short of making larger statements about narcissism and abuse in my review of The Housemaid, but for now, I’ll leave you with the knowledge that this book is certainly readable. I finished it in a couple days. If you like her as an author, all the power to you. She’s probably not someone I’ll read a lot of. A year from now, I won’t remember The Teacher. It won’t stay with me the way other books have. It’ll just be one of those books I read once and never think of again.
3 out of 5 stars. For Colleen Hoovering the hell out of the Shyamalan twist.
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This was my first time reading Freida McFadden. She’s so popular that I’m surprised it took me this long. But… There’s always a but… Like Colleen Hoover, I find McFadden’s writing to be a bit simple. The story in interesting enough to get through though, and here we are. By the way, this contains spoilers because I was kind of annoyed by the twist after twist ending. Reader beware.
Protagonist Eve is married to Nate. They are both high school teachers, she in math and he in english. The new school year brings student Addie to both their classrooms. It was rumored that Addie had an affair with a teacher the previous year and that teacher lost his job. Eve hates Addie for it while Nate ends up having an affair with her himself behind his wife’s back. The rub, though, is that Addie didn’t have an affair with a teacher the year before. She did, however, let her alcoholic father die and made her best friend lie about it which causes a rift between them. Eve, too, is having an affair behind her husband’s back. Eventually, Nate uses Addie to get her to attack Eve and bury the body.
This entire book had me guessing, but I was never truly surprised by any of its revelations. Not even the twist reveal in the final pages that meant that Eve’s affair, who we were led to believe was with an adult married man, was really with a student. We find this out from the boy who was also Addie’s best friend. The very thing that Eve hated Nate for, and judged him for, was sleeping with a student. Though the book never explicitly states that Eve knew that her affair was with a high schooler, there is no way she didn’t see him in the halls of her school. No way she didn’t see him with Addie – a high profile student after the rumored affair – at some point. I don’t really believe that Eve did not know that the supposed married man whose wife was always calling during their time together wasn’t really a student. A seventeen year old is not a twenty five year old in any capacity. How could she not have known? This twist has no place in reality and wrecked the entire book for me.
The murder plot where Addie loses her cool and hits Eve over the head only to have Nate reappear and force her to help him bury her could have been plausible if it weren’t for that twist ending. This book was twisty enough – especially when we find out that Addie was just the most recent in a long line of teenage girls Nate slept with – without the whole Eve slept with a student dinger at the end. None of these characters are likable and I had a hard time rooting for them.
I’m just going to say it – because The Housemaid is next in my review pile – Freida McFadden is the M. Night Shyamalan of book writing in the sense that she relies too heavily on the twists in her stories. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t dislike her books or her writing and I do love a good twist. I just find them to be too simply spoken and her writing is for the masses. There’s no real depth to the characters here. They are just unreliable narrators and unlikable people. This could have had something big to say about men who prey on teenage girls, and it almost does, but it falls short by making the murder plot the main story.
I’ll be honest by saying that the reason I picked this up in the first place was I needed something easy after reading The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah which was beautiful and heartbreaking and heavy in the emotion department. The Teacher was certainly easy, probably too easy. While The Nightingale left me thinking about it for weeks, The Teacher left me feeling empty. It says a lot about the writing here.
I’ll get more into how McFadden writes men as villains but manages to fall short of making larger statements about narcissism and abuse in my review of The Housemaid, but for now, I’ll leave you with the knowledge that this book is certainly readable. I finished it in a couple days. If you like her as an author, all the power to you. She’s probably not someone I’ll read a lot of. A year from now, I won’t remember The Teacher. It won’t stay with me the way other books have. It’ll just be one of those books I read once and never think of again.
3 out of 5 stars. For Colleen Hoovering the hell out of the Shyamalan twist.
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