4/5 stars for me. While it wasn’t a literary masterpiece, it was a fun read and I couldn’t put it down. It’s especially great for this time of year and back-to-school as it focuses on Teddy Crutcher, an English teacher at the prestigious Belmont Academy who has just won Teacher of the Year. He’s the kind of teacher who will be totally petty just to teach his students a lesson. He doesn’t want to be bothered with annoying colleagues, helicopter parents, or students who do anything but live fully up to their potential.

There was something about this that kept reminding me in different ways of Crime and Punishment, but Teddy experiences his own emotions in different ways than Raskolnikov. Both books share this idea of an obligation to do terrible things “for the greater good.” This is obviously not classic Russian literature, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I don’t believe this author got paid by the word 😄