The beginning of the school year brings a late enrollment into Allison Walsh’s Kindergarten class. Gracie has moved to Wirriga to be closer to the hospitals and treatments that hold the only hope for saving her young life.
Allison prides herself as a caring person but since her husband left, taking their son she's been struggling. Taking Gracie and her Dad into her home Allison determines to save the family. But can she help this little girl with the tragic story, and what are the lines that a good teacher should never cross?
The tragic story of Gracie and her dad Luke capture the hearts of the community. Allison rallies the school to fundraise and Luke's new colleague at the gym Maz sees health and fitness as a key to helping everyone live their best lives amidst the struggle.
The Good Teacher is a thriller and at its heart there is a mystery to be solved, but more intriguingly is the way that mystery collides with our modern covid crisis of faith in information and facts. When I spoke with Petronella for Final Draft (check out the podcast) she told me the story was originally meant to be set in 2020. This required a few rewrites as the plot progression could not be sustained in a socially distanced world, but it still intersects with our search and our struggle for reliable information in 2020.
As Gracie’s illness progresses everyone wants to be the one to save her. Diving deep into the world of online remedies each of the characters find information to support their theories and contradict the others. Maz begins to research supplements and quickly dives deep into an internet rabbit hole of fabulous and miraculous miracle cure testimonies.
Here on the page we see the tragedy and trauma of our own scientific illiteracy play out. Characters fall into echo chambers of their own self-belief and cannot see any other way. And this blindness comes to shape their behaviour and impact their wider world.
We see this in Allison. After her husband leaves her she is driven to extraordinary behaviour; following them home and waiting outside the house desperately seeking some clue as to why this has happened to her. These extremes are reversed when she takes in Luke and Gracie hoping through kindness to restore some sort of equilibrium. Driven to these extremes Allison indulges in other transgressions, sneaking Gracie treats against her father’s wishes, convinced she knows better.
Throughout The Good Teacher plays with our understanding of truth and what is real and this of course leads the reader to the mystery that has been lurking beneath the surface…
But I’m not going to tell you about that!
Check out the good reader and as you marvel at the lengths the characters will go to convince themselves take a look at how our modern lives have similarly become a war of weaponised information and competing versions of truth...
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