For Your Own Good is a novel you can predict and is still a delight to read. If a high school mystery with teachers who believe they are perfect and students caught in the crossfire (or are they?) interests you, then this is the novel for you.

Told from five viewpoints, you will be granted with a full picture and that is the only downside of this novel to be aware of. This over-narration prevents you from being able to take the wrong path or draw the wrong conclusion which for me, is a significant reason why I read thrillers - because I enjoy the detours and this novel had none. But as the characters are written so well and the writing itself is solid, you will want to see justice play out regardless of the fact you know where the cookie is going to crumble.

For Your Own Good by Samantha Downing is a psychological thriller to breeze through and read if you like predictability and complex characters.

The plot is predictable. Because this has five narrators, their varying perspectives leave nothing to the imagination. You will know exactly who is thinking what and what will happen next. Do not be alarmed, there are a few surprises along the way but for the genre's this type of novel falls in too, it lacks surprise.

For Your Own Good relies more heavily on the characters and the mystery behind their decisions.

All the characters in For Your Own Good are fantastic and they are the sole reason why I bumped this novel from a Hit or Miss to Worth Your Time.

Teddy is an arrogant teacher with vendetta's against certain students. Zach is one of those students whose parents believe anything other than an A is failure. Sonia is the English teacher who plays humble but is quite prideful. Frank is a teacher who prays to God to understand his path. Courtney is Zach's best friend and another individual with insane parents. And then there's Fallon, a previous high school graduate of Belmont with a grudge against a certain teacher.

Those descriptions of the characters barely grasp the surface as apart from Fallon, they are complex and their motives are so vastly different throughout it makes it quite enjoyable to see them ping pong off each other. Their personalities create a dynamic scenario to give you insight into what's really going on and justification on who to or who not to root for.

Predictable. A novel worth your time but with very guessable moments.

The characters needed to get their heads out of their bums. They were all varying shades of confused or entitled making their choices so preposterous and fun to read but damn, they annoyed because all I wanted was to shake them and go - "See! Look here! Look what's happening!" The characters outwitted my sanity and that made the story enticing and yes, I loathed Teddy. The entitlement that oozed out of him... no wonder Frank took matters into his own hands.

I actually think the novel could have benefited from losing Frank and/or Fallon's narration and instead solely focused on Zach and Terry with a splash of Sonia as that would have made the narrative unreliable and potentially caused more suspense. Because we knew from Zach, Fallon, and Frank that Teddy was a sleazy guy, there was no doubt in my mind there would be repercussions for him. Now, if it had been a battle between a student and a teacher, who knows? Teddy was written as an megalomaniac type of characters so I think I still would have rooted for Zach or maybe I would have rooted for both!

It feels to me the novel could have benefited from a bit more ambiguity to enhance the mystery/thriller aspect. The only thing in the whole novel that surprised me was Fallon dying from CO₂ poisoning instead of a plant-based poison but also, why the heck did she not leave her apartment? She had evidence he was a psychopath and yet, she stayed? What is because of pride? Doubt? Shame? Who knows.

I found For Your Own Good to be a delightful but so so predictable read. Did I mind? No. Did I enjoy this? Yes. Do I want to hear your thoughts? Yes.