Trust Exercise

by Susan Choi

WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

'Will leave you shaken to your very core' Cosmopolitan

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2019 by Buzzfeed, Entertainment Weekly, New York Magazine, Electric Literature, The Millions, PopSugar, Philadelphia Inquirer, Publisher's Weekly, Lit Hub, Bustle and Huffington Post

Sarah and David are in love - the obsessive, uncertain love of teenagers on the edge of adulthood. They have just started their first term at a performing arts school, where the rules are made by their magnetic drama instructor Mr Kingsley, who initiates them into a dangerous game. Two decades on we learn that the real story of these teenagers' lives is even larger and darker than we imagined, and the consequences have lasted a lifetime. Trust Exercise is a brilliant, unforgettable novel about what we lose, gain and never get over as we're initiated into adulthood's mysterious structures of sex and power.

• ISBN10: 1250231264
• ISBN13: 9781250231260
• Publish Date: 5 May 2020 (first published 9 April 2019)
• Publish Status: Active
• Imprint: Holt McDougal
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 272
• Language: English

Reviews

[empressbrooke]

A lot of the reviews for this book are pretty negative and note that they gave up early on. I ended up liking the book as a whole, but found the negative reviews pretty understandable. The first 130 pages are exhaustingly wordy and pretentious and I only kept going because A) it's my book club's pick of the month, and B) it promised an unreliable narrator, which is something I really love. I wanted to know how everything I was reading was going to be revealed to be not exactly the truth.

When I got to the second section 130 pages in, I was relieved to find out that the overwrought MFA grad gone wild nature of the writing up until that point was a purposeful choice because the narrator actually was an overwrought MFA grad gone wild. The rest of the book at that point was much easier and more enjoyable to read, and I had fun comparing the narrators' perspectives and seeing what differences they presented.

It's very well constructed, but it did raise the question for me about whether a well constructed book has done the job it set out to do if it loses half its readers before it can reveal what its intentions actually are. It reminded me of my feelings about [b:Affinity|25337939|Affinity|Sarah Waters|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1428720323l/25337939._SY75_.jpg|1413038] by [a:Sarah Waters|25334|Sarah Waters|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1409248454p2/25334.jpg], where my review notes that the first 90% was extremely slow and boring, and yet the final pages revealed an astonishing feat that the author had set up and pulled off that left me very impressed. Like I did with this book, I also rated Affinity three stars, not because I generally enjoyed all of my time with it, but my impression of the full package was, "I like what the author did in the overall scheme of things."