I heartily recommend THE DRAMA TEACHER if you are not tired of all the new books that seem to hang their respective hats on the damaged, unreliable narrator who manages to rise above it all and recover some lost element of her life. This novel takes that plot device and turns it on its head. Author Koren Zailckas demonstrates in her sophomore fiction effort that the critical success of her suspense novel MOTHER, MOTHER was no fluke. It will leave you doubting everything, and maybe just about everyone in your life, by story’s end.

THE DRAMA TEACHER features Gracie Mueller, who, as the story begins, is pulling a mild con so that she can take her children swimming --- and maybe to lunch --- at the Odell Resort and Spa in upstate New York. It only takes Zailckas a few pages and a phone call to put the reader deep into Gracie’s moment…and she is in deep. She isn’t just trying to sneak her two kids into the exclusive members-and-guests-only establishment. She is also balancing a home on the verge of foreclosure, while her husband Randy (who isn’t really her husband, but that is another story) is in Florida, trying to salvage his rapidly failing real estate agency.

"[T]he real reason for picking up this late-summer work is to bear witness to how Zailckas plays with and manipulates the emotions of the reader. One can almost see Gracie nodding approvingly."

It is quickly established that Gracie is a master manipulator who, in the course of an afternoon, manages to begin ingratiating herself into the life of a woman at the club named Melanie Ashworth. Melanie is buying Gracie drinks and her children lunch before the afternoon is over, and within a few days, they have moved into the (relatively palatial) Ashworth estate at Melanie’s insistence. Gracie --- now Tracey Mueller --- goes with the flow, but when that flow turns into a tidal wave, she flips the script and flees to New York, where she befriends an instructor at a posh New York school and insinuates herself into a situation where she begins doing what she does best, until the lies of the last 20 or so years begin catching up with her.

Someone like Gracie --- or Tracey, or whatever she happens to be calling herself --- does not spring fully formed from a god’s forehead, and so it is that her first-person narrative of the present is interspersed with the description of her past, where we find out that Gracie learned at the knee of her author, a master of deception whose biggest marks included his own daughter. The depth of Zailckas’ talent is such that the reader cannot help but sympathize with her larcenous client, if only for the innocents who tow along in her wake. The conclusion is unpredictable, and not entirely neat and tidy, but that doesn’t keep the reader --- or Gracie --- from hoping that everything will work out for her somewhere beyond the final crease in the book’s back binding. 

THE DRAMA TEACHER is in part a cautionary tale for our times. Zailckas fills her tale with the whats and hows of online, telephone and street scams. And while you boys and girls won’t necessarily want to try any of them at home or on the street, it behooves you to keep an eye and ear out for them so that you don’t fall victim yourself. Packing a copy of the book in the knapsack of your supposedly worldly college freshman wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. However, the real reason for picking up this late-summer work is to bear witness to how Zailckas plays with and manipulates the emotions of the reader. One can almost see Gracie nodding approvingly. And, as with the best cons, Zailckas leaves the reader happy.