The Teacher (spoilers and ending explained) | Freida McFadden
This is my full spoiler review for Freida McFadden’s The Teacher, where I lay out exactly what happened, explain the ending, and say what I really thought about this book. If you want to avoid spoilers, go back to my unspoiled-review. You can always come back when you finish!
Freida is best known for the Housemaid series (reviews for The Housemaid, The Housemaid’s Secret, and The Housemaid is Watching can be found at the links), but I think her standalone thrillers are worth considering. Especially if you (like me) were kind of over Millie. After reading The Teacher, check out her newest book The Boyfriend!
What was The Teacher about? (brief recap)
High School math teacher Eve is obsessed with expensive shoes—something she hides from her attractive husband and fellow teacher, Nate. Nate is an English teacher and undeniably out of Eve’s league physically. He’s the focus of school girl crushes all over the school. When Eve learns that a troubled student named Addie is in both her junior math class and Nate’s junior English class, she’s concerned.
One of Addie’s former math teachers was forced to resign after allegations that he was having an inappropriate relationship with her came out. Addie didn’t exactly deny the rumors, and maybe even encouraged them. Eve knows Addie is manipulative and dangerous, particularly since she’ll be in her husband’s class.
But Addie isn’t the only one with secrets. Eve and Nate each have their own secrets, and one may be dark enough to lead to murder…
What happens in The Teacher?
Addie knowingly let the school believe she was having an affair with her math teacher, though it wasn’t clear whether she did it intentionally or just was too awkward to correct their assumptions. It turns out they didn’t have an affair, but that doesn’t stop everyone from believing it. Addie is being bullied by a beautiful, popular classmate named Kenzie Montgomery. Kenzie is dating Addie’s former best friend, Hudson. We eventually learn that Addie helped Hudson murder his father, who was an abusive drunk. Hudson and her haven’t spoken much since.
Eve is saddened by her sex-less marriage with Nate, who doesn’t seem to be attracted to her, so she goes to a shoe store to drown her sorrows buying expensive footwear and having an affair with the shoe salesman, Jay. Eve and Jay have been having an affair once per week for months, so it isn’t just the expensive shopping she is hiding.
Meanwhile Addie is thrilled that hot teacher Nate notices how great her poetry is and invites her to join the poetry magazine at school. Nate continues to encourage Addie, saying he plans to submit her poem to a state competition. He even writes Addie a poem because he is so inspired by her (gross). Nate also stands up for Addie when his wife catches her cheating on a math test and threatens to go to the principal. Eve doesn’t trust Addie after the lies she spread about her former math teacher.
Eventually, Nate and Addie’s relationship turns sexual, and they begin hooking up in the photography darkroom. Addie thinks they are in love when Nate tells her that she is his soulmate. The two continue to exchange terrible poems and have sex even though Addie is a minor which therefore makes Nate a pedophile and a rapist.
After Addie creeps outside of Nate and Eve’s house one night and Eve spots her, Addie is called into the principal’s office. Nate tells her to lie, but no one believes her because she was caught doing the same thing to her former math teacher the year before. After this, Nate begins to ghost her and Addie spirals over it. She approaches him in his classroom one day over lunch and they kiss, which Eve spots and takes a photograph of.
How did The Teacher end?
Eve meets up with her shoe salesman lover Jay and the two agree she needs to leave Nate. Eve gets drunk that night and kicks Nate out, and Nate texts Addie to tell her he wishes Eve were dead. Addie shows up at the house that night and she and Eve get into a fight. When Eve tries to tell Addie that her husband is a sexual predator and it isn’t her fault, Addie hits Eve with a frying pan and then calls Nate to come help.
Eve wakes up while Addie is getting a sheet to wrap her body in, and Nate strangles her. Addie still believes she was the one who murdered Eve and doesn’t know if was Nate, though she notices finger bruises on her neck and that she is in a different spot than before. Nate convinces her to go with him to bury the body in an abandoned pumpkin patch. Addie is digging a hole when Nate goes back to the car to get Eve’s purse (allegedly). Nate leaves Addie at the pumpkin patch to bury the body and to take the fall. Nate drives home and goes to sleep.
Addie finishes burying Eve and calls Hudson to come get her when she realizes that Nate left her. Meanwhile Nate keeps finding weird things at his house—a pair of shoes that he knows his wife was wearing when she was buried. Other shoes with smashed pumpkin or dirt on them. The police question Addie after Nate points them in that direction.
Meanwhile school bully Kenzie shows up at Addie’s house to apologize for bullying her. It turns out that the year before Kenzie was in a sexual relationship with Nate, and he gave her the same poems he claimed he wrote for Addie. The girls tell the police everything and they head to Nate’s house. Meanwhile Nate is suspicious of the strange events and goes to check on Eve’s grave, only to find her body isn’t there.
It turns out Eve was alive and clawed out of the poorly covered hole and had her lover Jay pick her up. She has been tormenting Nate and hiding out in Jay’s toolshed. They follow Nate to the gravesite and hit him with a rock, causing his death.
It is revealed that the poem that Addie and Kenzie thought Nate wrote for each of them was actually a poem he wrote for Eve when she was fifteen and his student (ugh). Nate has been a pedophile and groomer all along. When the police learn Eve is alive, they stop the investigation. Everyone assumes Nate fled town because he was exposed as a pedophile. Eve quits her job as a teacher and moves. Addie and Hudson are friends again after he helped her that night.
And then we learn the final twist… Addie’s friend Hudson Jankowski is the same “Jay” that Eve was sleeping with at the shoe store. Eve is also apparently a sexual predator, only she has gotten away with it.
Did Eve know that Jay was a student (Hudson) at the school she taught at?
This is the most commonly asked question about this book, and for good reason! The short answer is that yes, Eve did know that Jay was a student at the school and that his real name was Hudson. Why is this so confusing for readers? Well, it’s because Freida did her classic technique where she doesn’t know how to disguise a twist, so she has a narrator lie in their internal monologue. I had to go back to confirm that Eve does indicate that the voices in the background when she calls Jay are a wife and kids. But later, she confirms that it was Jay’s mother and she knew it all along. Long story short–if you are wondering how Eve could never notice that Jay was also a student at the school, she absolutely knew the whole time. She’s as bad as her husband, quite frankly!
What did I think about the ending?
I don’t know what to say here… this is gross. Even going back to type up how everything unfolds, I was a mix of bored and disgusted by the plot. Nearly every single twist in this book related to secret grooming and pedophilia, which feels both lazy and dirty (not in the fun way). I have seen a lot of readers that loved this book, and I will say that the twists with Nate grooming Eve as a student, and Eve grooming Hudson/Jay definitely blindsided me. I didn’t guess either of those coming, so that is some credit to McFadden.
At a certain point, it seems that the reader is supposed to like Eve more as she is the one to tell Addie that her husband’s actions towards her are inappropriate. Even though she notes that sixteen is the age of consent, she acknowledges that he is the adult and the teacher and should know better. This is all somewhat undone when we learn that actually Kenzie and Eve were both fifteen at the time he assaulted them (which is negligible because it isn’t any better at sixteen than fifteen, in my opinion). Further, Hudson / Jay was fifteen when Eve began assaulting him!
When I lay out the “twists” like this, it’s pretty gross, right? I can’t really enjoy that the twist was nearly everyone in this book was groomed and victimized by adults who they should be able to trust. I guess it is a blindside twist, but not in a good way.
If we set that aside, I also struggled with the logistics of the night Nate tried to murder Eve once we find out that Hudson and Jay are the same person. Are we to believe that while Eve was lying mostly buried, Hudson picked Addie up and helped her home and how to cover this up. Then Eve clawed out of the ground and he somehow made it all the way back to the remote pumpkin patch to pick her up, bring her to the shoe store, and get her boots. It just doesn’t make sense to me given how the timeline was presented.
I don’t know what else to say. The more I write about this, the more I have to say this is a disturbing and uncomfortable (at best) way to plot a thriller. It’s not even about the content warnings for me, but rather that grooming is continued to be used as the big “gotcha” moment over and over in the book. It leaves a sour taste to the book, in my opinion.
I’m sure others enjoyed this more than I did, so please check out other reviews! This was not for me, and my ranking went lower the more I thought about it.
For a review of a Freida McFadden book that I did enjoy, check out my review of The Housemaid where I dig into that twisty ending and the comparisons to another popular book!
