The Teacher by Freida McFadden

Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new review! On my Freida McFadden book train this time we make a stop at The Teacher. A spin-tingling thriller that dives into the taboo topic of teacher-student relationships, mental health, and manipulation, this is definitely one to check out.

Main Characters:

• Addie: A 16-year-old girl trying to overcome the struggles of her Dad passing and being bullied at school for getting a teacher fired after it was presumed they were having an inappropriate relationship despite her denials, the thing is she does have secrets it’s just not those ones
• Eve Bennett: A teacher at Addie’s high school who often acts like things are better than they are, her marriage with her husband is struggling and she has a student in her class Addie who seems hell-bent on causing issues for her at work

My Review

I have to be careful as to what I say in this review because one slip exposes it all. Since this is a fairly new book in Freida’s catalogue (dropped just this February) I am not going to be doing a spoiler section in this review, but the things to spoil in The Teacher by Freida McFadden are massive, and if you’ve liked other of her books then I would recommend checking this one out. There isn’t a ton of mystery in this one it’s more of a book where you just keep waiting for the next bomb to drop. Overall I gave the book an 8.5/10 rating.

Eve Bennett has a career of being known as the hard teacher, and a mean woman. The truth is it’s just a wall she puts up to hide her intense insecurities. Being a teacher in a high school definitely doesn’t help anything. Furthermore, this new school year is starting off with struggles. Her mentor Mr. Tuttle was fired due to it being heavily suspected he was having an inappropriate relationship with a student when she was found outside his house among other things. Now she has to face said student named Addie in her class every day. I struggled with Eve as a character, a part of me got her but there were other parts where I struggled to like her. It often seemed like she was unnecessarily cruel to Addie given that she was the child in the situation when it came to whatever went down with Mr. Tuttle if anything actually did. I questioned if she treated her this way because she actually thought it was true that her mentor took advantage of this teenager and since she can’t take her anger out on him she does it to her, or if she thinks that it’s all Addie’s fault for his loss of work and is a liar.

Addie is also a difficult character. While obviously there is sympathy there for what she went through and what she continues to go through with the bullying for a lot of the book I struggled to get a grasp of how stable she was. It was so up and down and it often made it hard to know if her perspective was one to trust. Given that we get perspectives from both Eve and Addie in the book it’s hard to tell which perspective is the best to believe. Addie to a degree does seem very innocent and pure but then you have the voice of Eve saying that she can’t be trusted. It was also tough for me to read the parts where Addie was getting bullied at school because it was a little too real in some parts and it just gave me a flashback to school when I was a kid. I just kept wanting to yell ‘Stand up for yourself girl!’ but when you get to the meat of why this girl is so broken down it makes sense. Now isolated in school Addie tries to figure out how to find herself in a space that judges her for things they don’t even know the reality of.

I can’t really get into how the book picks up and progresses because that would give like 10 things away but I will just say that it’s very good. I crushed this book out in a day because I was having such a hard time putting it down. It’s such a fast-paced easy enjoyable read that messes with your mind in a good way. I think when it comes to a topic like student-teacher relationships it takes a special touch to tackle it in the right way (essentially the opposite of Aria and Ezra from PLL lol). I felt like Freida tackled it in a way that added drama and juice but didn’t take it in a direction that was cruel or disrespectful. I appreciated that she always made it clear that Addie was not the one to blame for how adults around her acted and I appreciated this because when I was 16 I made a lot of stupid decisions because I had no clue what a good decision was at that point, so I think we need to only blame the adults in these situations.

Overall, it is a super good read, and if you like Freida McFadden’s books you will definitely enjoy this one. It’s got her classic style to it that just makes it such an enjoyable book where you get pulled in and don’t want to leave until the very last page. Have you read The Teacher by Freida McFadden before? What did you think?

I hope you enjoyed this review! Feel free to follow me on my socials @baddiebookreviews to be kept up to date for when I release a new review!