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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