For Your Own Good by Samantha Downing #BookReview

Teddy Crutcher has won Teacher of the Year at the elite Belmont Academy, home to the best and brightest.

He says his wife couldn’t be more proud—though no one has seen her in a while.

Teddy really can’t be bothered with a few mysterious deaths on campus that are looking more and more like murder, or with the student digging a little too deep into Teddy’s personal life. His main focus is pushing these kids to their full academic potential.

All he wants is for his colleagues—and the endlessly meddlesome parents—to stay out of his way. If not, well, they’ll get what they deserve.

It’s really too bad that sometimes excellence comes at such a high cost.

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This novel is about Teddy Crutcher. He’s Teacher of the Year at Belmont and his award hangs proudly on the otherwise pristine white walls of his classroom. Teddy is… quite the character. He loves teaching, even teaching some to be better people. If they don’t want to listen they just need to feel it, it’s all for their own good. Unfortunately Teddy makes a mistake and then things only go from bad to worse.

For Your Own Good was fun to read, even with all the murders that happened. A serial killer as a teacher, I didn’t need to hear more. You don’t have to take it too seriously but just go along with the wild ride. It was mostly fun because there was a lot of diversion and pingpong in this novel where the blame is put on people you don’t want to see blamed and you didn’t expect them to get sucked into this. As a reader you know better of course and I kept wanting Teddy to be found out.

I was also very afraid for Zach, one of his students who he targets because he always ‘has a smirk on his face’ and looks arrogant. I was expecting him to either get blamed for murder thanks to Teddy or to be murdered by him so I rooted so much for him. There were several times during my reading that I wanted to shout at Zach to be careful, as well as to Teddy’s co-workers that Teddy Crutcher was dangerous. I hoped someone would stop him.

All I wanted was for Teddy to get his comeuppance for what he did, I looked forward to that moment. I’m feeling a bit ambiguous at the end of the novel by the way it was wrapped up. It’s a good ending, surprising as well, but not exactly how I wanted it to end. It fell a bit flat for me because I wanted the big guns to come out so the whole school would be shook with the revelation. Obviously, it was a different ending than what I had in mind.

Overall, this novel was not at all what I had expected on any front but I found it quite entertaining. Maybe one to give to your children to read, you never know it’ll help keep hem in check at school 🙂

I bought an ecopy of this novel. This is my honest opinion.