The teacher

Frieda Mcfadden

Stars:***

Oh, Freida.

I will say, every time I pick up a Freida book, I know I’m going to finish it in one day. Unfortunately, The Housemaid and The Boyfriend top every other Freida thriller I’ve read by far.

Here we have two severely unlikeable protagonists. I spent every Eve chapter wanting to slap Eve and every Addie chapter wanting to slap Addie. Eve is a 29 year old high school trigonometry teacher with a hottie husband, Nate, who also teaches at the school, but English. Addie is a 16 year old student at said high school. Both Eve and Hottie Nate are Addie’s teachers this year.

Eve is weirdly obsessed with shoes (lit?) and everyone thinks Addie slept with a different high school math teacher, Mr. Tuttle. Now, here’s the unlikeable part. I didn’t necessarily need multiple scenes of Eve trying on Jimmy Choos or Louis Vuittons and feeling some type of way about it. Math, shoes, and a husband who hates her were this lady’s only characteristics. Meanwhile, the endless bullying of Addie by stereotypically popular girl Kenzie got old fast. Knocking lunch trays off tables, filling the locker with shaving cream, blah blah blah. The rest of her characterization was her being a dumb-dumb. Yes, a victim, but also a dumb-dumb.

Zooming through the rest of the book, Addie and Nate start hooking up, Addie gets increasingly pissed that Eve is “making Nate miserable”, Eve catches Addie and Nate locking lips, Addie smacks Eve over the head with a frying pan and almost unalives her, but then Nate finishes her off for realsies. They bury her and Addie realizes that Nate is telling the cops it was her. Her betrayal is worsened when Kenzie shows up to say that Nate had slept with her too, at a whopping age of 14. Addie and Kenzie go to tell the police the truth, while shoes with dirt on them start showing up around Nate’s house. Surprise! Eve’s not dead, that whole “buried alive” thing was just a bump in the road. Eve decides to end Nate via a shovel and some ties (good riddance), resigns from the school, and seemingly gets away with it. We also find out that Eve was 15 and Nate’s student when they got together. Yuck.

Now, the weird lingering subplot. Addie has an ex best friend named Hudson, who ditched her after they worked together to shove her drunk, useless dad down the stairs, ending him. He’s seemingly dating Kenzie, but clearly still cares for Addie. Meanwhile, Eve is, throughout the book, having an affair with a man called Jay who works at the shoe store. She seems to believe he has a wife and a baby at home. However, in the very last pages, it is revealed that Hudson is Jay. Yep. That’s right. Eve was banging a high schooler too. Which is weird because her most redeeming arch in the whole book is when she essentially tells Addie “He’s 38 and you’re 16, you delusional sack of socks.”

I’d seen some questions online about whether Eve knew Hudson/Jay was a high schooler, and it seems Freida has confirmed that she did. Yuck. It seems that the best thing to come out of this whole debacle is Addie and Kenzie’s newfound friendship. Guessing then Addie didn’t mention the whole “stealing her house key and raiding her closet” thing.

Another thing I have to mention about this book. The poetry. Nate writes the same poem for Eve, Kenzie, and Addie. Addie writes some garbage poetry we’re forced to suffer through too. Addie’s love poem inspired by Nate almost had me chucking my book from second-hand embarrassment. Not to mention the parts where she called him “Nathaniel.” Made me glad when Eve buried him.

I finished this book in one day, so the stars are kind of misleading. However, I still wanted to kick Eve and Addie’s heads in my the end. Also, there wasn’t really a twist relevant to the main plot. It was kind of finished out as you’d expect and then Freida was like “but wait” and threw that little nugget in there. I do like the idea of the unreliable narrator, but I feel like it could have been done better.

Overall, definitely still worth a read, especially if you’re looking for a quick read mystery that won’t keep you up at night. However, if you’re looking for a Freida rec- it’s still the Housemaid followed by The Boyfriend.

Live laugh love,