Trust Exercise is a book within a book, a story within a story within a story. What you think is happening ends up nowhere near the truth.
Sarah and David are teenage lovers turned sour during their junior year at a prestigious art school.
As soon as you think you have this story figured out, it switches time and perspective to Karen. From Karen's perspective, you find out that Sarah and David's story was part of a book written by older Sarah. Karen, who played a small part in the book, is grappling with the past after reading the book.
Karen's story comes to a tumultuous ending and immediately another story (connected, as you soon find out) begins of a young woman trying to find her birth parents.

Trust Exercise both refers to things Sarah, David and their classmates must do in their theatre class and what the reader must go through while reading the book, trusting that Choi will reveal the actual story before the ending. I don't know if she every does, from my perspective. The book is an interesting ride but one I didn't want to go on in the first place.

After reading nearly half of this novel, I decided to put it down; the writing style and story are just not a good fit for me, so I will not be sharing my thoughts on this one publicly.

Trust Exercise gives us a glimpse into the lives of students at a prestigious performing arts high school. Some are passionate, some talented, and some trying to find themselves, and all are shaped by an intriguing and unusual drama teacher. This book is more than what it seems, and I won't go beyond that, as it's best enjoyed without too many expectations. I will say that it plays with perspective, objective vs. subjective, and memory. Susan Choi is incredibly smart in the way she presents these complex and surprising characters. Trust Exercise will definitely keep you on your toes!

I had to force myself to finish this book, and that’s never a good thing. At times this book was nicely written and I found myself see-sawing between frustrated and absorbed. I knew from reviews that there were major changes in the plot and I wanted to see what happened.

Trust Exercise is about Sarah and David, two teenagers at a high school for the arts. The title refers to the exercises the students endure from their drama teacher, who is involved in their lives and relationships. Sarah and David meet during an exercise in their drama class, and Mr. Kingsley prods Sarah and David, in front of their classmates, to explore their feelings for each other. When they meet, they are instantly in lust – or is it love? It’s hard to tell, which I appreciated, since when you’re a teenager I think it’s hard to tell anyway. Sarah and David seem like fairly run of the mill teens, with problems relating to their parents, money, self-esteem, and communicating with each other honestly.

This is a very introspective book, where not a lot happens. Choi builds intrigue in a number of areas but the way this book is written, it’s never very clear what’s happening. Most of the book is seen through Sarah’s eyes, and her perception is fuzzy a lot of the time. Things just seem to happen around her, but not to her or because of her.

This is a book where none of the characters are likable, although usually that doesn’t bother me – I prefer gnarly, troubled characters to nice ones. But here, I wasn’t sure who to like – everyone seemed abusive in some way, including the teacher. I was intrigued by Sarah and David’s relationship because it felt real to me; they spend most of the book looking at each other but very rarely actually talk to each other. But Sarah is also incredibly self-absorbed and not very nice to anyone, so I never found myself rooting for her or anyone else.

There is a shift in narrator about halfway through, and also a jump ahead in time. I nearly dropped the book at that point (and would have if it wasn’t an ARC), because the new narrator is so annoying and it became really hard to follow. And just when it started to make sense, the story-line became obvious.

I will say also that while the writing is really beautiful at times, it’s told in a stream-of-consciousness prose that is hard to read, if you’re someone who likes paragraphs and chapters.

All in all, this book felt pretentious to me. I realize the critics like it, and some readers on Goodreads found it “mind-blowing”. A number of readers on Goodreads compared it to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, another book I felt unable to appreciate. There are probably big ideas in this book I just didn’t get; and that’s how I felt reading it.

Note: I received a complimentary copy of this book from NetGalley and publisher Henry Holt and Co. This book publishes April 9, 2019.

This is a book that was worth the hype! I love Choi's style and definitely want to read more of her books. I could not put this down and read it in one sitting.

I couldn’t get through this - it felt directionless and I found parts of the narrative content itself problematic

I really liked this book … until I didn’t.

I liked getting to know David and Sarah. I liked their awkwardness and their inability to communicate. Susan Choi perfectly captured that first teen love, the one that levels you and renders you incapable of rational thought. I liked Mr. Kingsley. I mean, I didn’t like him. He’s awful. But I liked how Choi shows you the dark side to charismatic teachers who begin to believe their own myth a bit too much. in fact, I spent the first third of this book in wide-eyed wonderment at how Choi crafted this story.

There is a fine line, though, between craftsmanship and preciousness. Susan Choi doesn’t just straddle that line, she leaps over it. You can almost feel the moment that this turns from an examination of two teenagers trying to find their way in a performing arts high school while under the thrall of a teacher whose allure is almost impossible to avoid into something … gimmicky.

Right as you really get into this story, Choi changes both the timeframe and narrator. And then she changes it again. I know I’m supposed to have Deep Thoughts about perspective and reliability, but I was too busy thinking, “Oh, for crying out loud” to have such Deep Thoughts. I struggled to finish reading it, actually.

To see so many rave reviews for this book has me wondering if this isn’t an emperor without clothes kind of situation. It takes you about five sentences into the book to realize that Susan Choi is an AUTHOR. She can write, and she can tell you a fantastic story. But when the story starts to get beyond itself, when it starts to lose its way into a morass that wholly disconnects you from the characters, is the story still fantastic?

Not for me.

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on April 9, 2019

There was a movie-based television show called Fame in the 1980s about students who attended a performing arts high school. The first half of Trust Exercise reads like a novelization of Fame, except that the characters have more sex. The best scenes are about the tensions and insecurities of performance. The most dismal scenes (and there are too many of them for my taste) reflect the melodrama of sexually charged teenage life. Fame was mildly entertaining because of the students’ performances, as opposed to their melodrama. Since a novel must describe (for example) a singing performance rather than allowing a reader to hear the song, I was underwhelmed by the novel’s first half. But then the novel became something different, an adult story of substance.

Sarah is 14 in 1982, attending a theatre arts school in the South, where she is mentored by Mr. Kingsley until he seems to lose interest in her. She gets it on with a boy named David and subjects her other friends to teen drama because that’s what teenage girls do. Other characters have drama that is peripheral to Sarah’s, including some visiting British students who stage a production of Candide that strikes the community as scandalous. Sometimes Sarah makes the lives of other students worse because, well, she’s a teenager.

By the end of the novel’s first half, Sarah is 16 and filled with turmoil. The second half twists the story in a way that gives the title a new meaning — as in, reading is an exercise of trust in the author that might be misplaced. The second half jumps forward 14 years and focuses a character who is called “Karen” in quotation marks because (she tells us) women named Karen are bland and nondescript. Karen Wurtzel is a seemingly minor character in the novel’s first half who is notable for having a relationship with an adult British teacher named Martin who accompanied the British acting students.

We learn in the second half that Karen abandoned acting and singing after graduating high school, studied modern dance in college, and became an accountant, a bland career for a bland person. Having returned to the town where she went to high school, Karen is again in contact with David. She eventually renews her acquaintance with Sarah when she gets Sarah’s autograph on a book that Sarah has written.

Karen’s references to her own name in quotation marks and to “the person we’re calling Mr. Kingsley” give the reader a clue that something is amiss in the telling of the novel’s first half. Karen seems to be fascinated by words and their potential or unintended meanings, which is fascinating for readers who love words. Words have the potential to mislead and the reader begins to suspect that a good many words in the novel have been misleading in some way. As the novel’s second half dissects the first half, the true nature of the first half becomes clear. A final, relatively short section focuses on a new character who adds an unexpected twist to the story.

A central theme in Trust Exercise is that acting requires true emotions to be felt in false circumstances — but how do we know that an emotion is true? The novel is clever in its construction and perceptive in its characterizations, while reminding us that characters are, in fact, just characters. They are what the author wants us to see, just as real people portray themselves as they want others to see them. The novel demonstrates, in fact, how people — not just actors — play a part, and how difficult it is for individuals to set aside their masks and be real. That’s more insight than you’ll get from watching the entire five-year run of Fame, although a reader will need to make it through the first half to reach the good stuff.

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I really wanted to love this story. The writing style was unique. It took me a little while to get used to the flow of the writing, but once I got into the rhythm the story flowed quickly, and the story itself started out interesting. While Sarah and David were not my favorite characters, I found them to be typical teenagers and read their portion of the story easily. I did not like Karen, though, nor did I like reading from her point of view. I slogged through the last half of the book which killed it for me.

*Thank you to Netgalley for the free ARC in exchange for an honest review.*

Wow—what to say? Perhaps I should start by noting that so many critics love this book—starred reviews in Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly and so many others and a multi-page favorable spread in The New Yorker. I have to admit I’m baffled by this, as Trust Exercise shook my trust in critics and became an exercise in endurance. The novel starts out as the story of students in a performing arts high school and quickly zeroes in on two of them, Sarah and David, who share a passionate summer love affair before the pressure of being back at school immediately (and somewhat inexplicably) breaks them up. The remainder of the book’s first half is a slog through their now estranged relationship, as they are pressured by their creepy acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley, to dig into their emotions during acting class “trust exercises” and as they both move on to other equally bad relationships with members of an acting troupe from England in town to put on a performance of Candide.

Neither Sarah nor David was a believable or compelling character; I didn’t care about them or their relationship at all, particularly when I had to read lines like, “When unavoidably they met in classrooms David stared coldly and Sarah stared even more bitterly coldly and it was a contest, to pile up coldness, to shovel it furiously from their hearts.” I kept going, though, willing to give Choi the benefit of the doubt (she’s a Pulitzer finalist, after all!) and hang in there until the much vaunted twist that was going to justify everything and turn the book around. Nope—the second half with its new narrator/main character (the points of view change sentence to sentence) was possibly more annoying than the first (though it did explain why I had to suffer through the Candide stuff, which is something). Throw in a preposterous and ridiculously telegraphed ending and an unnecessary coda and this was a total miss for me.

I’d like to thank NetGalley and Henry Holt & Company for providing me an ARC of this title in exchange for my honest review. I truly wish I had liked it, but as I say, many people have and I’m sure it will find an appreciative audience. Maybe it’s me....

Broadway Direct April Pick Of The Month coverage: Novels are like a reverse trust exercise. Instead of falling backward and believing your friends will catch you, a reader falls into a story, trusting the writer to play fair and not waste your time. An author may immediately reassure you with a familiar plotline or fool you into a false sense of security before taking a hard left turn. You think you’ve been caught, only to realize the net is frayed and there’s another story underneath the one you thought you knew. Will that net hold, or is there another rude surprise waiting? That’s the effect of Pulitzer Prize nominee Susan Choi’s latest literary novel, Trust Exercise. It’s set in the hothouse of a performing arts school, where students Sarah and David fall under the spell of each other and their magnetic teacher, Mr. Kingsley. It’s the Reagan era, and Sarah is the Molly Ringwald character, a poor-ish student with a white-knight boyfriend in David, who is almost embarrassingly wealthy. That difference hardly matters when Mr. Kingsley turns the lights off in the classroom and students crawl over and around each other with uncontained sensual glee. Sarah and David outpace the rest, not by having sex (no great marker in this world) but by the intensity of their unstable attraction/repulsion. Mixed signals aren’t the half of it. Each acting lesson — such as sitting knee-to-knee in front of the class while repeating lines to one another — is agonizing for them, but each one serves as delicious entertainment for their oohing and aahing classmates, and irresistible fodder for the quietly manipulative Mr. Kingsley. Despite the young-adult subjects, this isn’t the TV show Fame, where lessons will be gently learned. It’s more intense and damaging than that. The story stays close to the raw, unforgiving, often-crying Sarah … until halfway through the novel, when the net frays and we fall into an entirely different understanding of what is going on. You don’t need a new perspective to know that the trust of the students is being abused, not in some dramatic scandal (though that happens too), but in a simpler, perhaps crueler way. Choi toys with our trust but it pays off in dividends. Certainly fans of theater and serious fiction will relish how frustrating and rewarding and life-changing a drama class can be for adolescents, even if the closest they get to the bright lights of Broadway is a seat in the audience. Trust us. -- Michael Giltz

Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise” would have been a satisfying novel if it was only the story of a group of teenagers and their teacher and mentor at a performing arts high school. Her carefully drawn characters and their relationships are fascinating and compelling.

But as the narrative point of view slipped sidewise in this book, I started to understand that believing in the narrator is the ultimate Trust Exercise, and that like Choi’s characters, we are likely to be disappointed in that trust.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Wow. I had seen the hype this was getting early in the year when I requested it, and it's fully earned. As someone who attended an arts-focused high school and was on the periphery of everyone involved in the drama program, I resonated with a lot of what happens in part one - high school hormones, trying to understand someone's feelings for you, etc. And then the flip that happens in the second part completely reframes all this, making the book not about that original part, but about the stories we tell, how we portray ourselves and others, and the effect that can have. There's a third act reveal that drives the final action and sets up the denouement, but the plotting and tension are masterful throughout this. I'm blown away.

Every book I pick up is a chance. A chance at something great. A chance at something terrible. I'm putting all of my trust into the writer to weave words together to make me feel something . It's...an exercise in trust.

There is a play with structure here by Susan Choi that is...mind blowing. Like other books, the timeline is played with, the viewpoint is played with and the truth is played with.

This book is phenomenal and very likely, most casual readers won't like it. This is something different, less straightforwad, more of a dance through words and letters.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi was actually better than I thought it would be. I picked this book just randomly and I wasn't disappointed. Choi tells the story of Sarah and David and their classmates as they deal with life at a prestigious performing arts high school. Then we moved forward a few years so see what paths they have taken. Although its marketed as an adult fiction it felt more YA'ish. Choi is an amazing writer and the way she pulls you into a story is amazing. Thank you Henry Holt and Netgalley for this free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I received an arc of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you Netgalley.

So, this was a hard one to review. I really wanted to like it. I mean it has fabulous reviews from critics. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t the best I’ve read. The written had potential to be beautiful. I just didn’t find the characters likeable or relatable.

This is only my opinion, others loved the book.

Trust: firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.

Where we place our trust is everything.

Amazing book that will abuse your trust again and again. About characters who have had their trust abused by family and friends.

I am left speechless.

Thank you so much, NetGalley and Henry Holt, for the advanced reading copy of this book. I so enjoyed it. FYI to all: It’s going to be published this coming Tuesday, April 9th. And you gotta read it.

Trust Exercise is going to be a hard book to review without spoilers (but I shall attempt). So much of what makes it great is in the surprises you get along the way as a reader. So you’re just going to have to trust me when I tell you that this book was really, really good.

One thing to know: The prose in this book is like poetry. It’s like music. It’s breathtaking and poignant and takes you on an emotional trip. If you love to read prose like that, then this book is absolutely for you. But if that kind of musical, somewhat flowery prose isn’t your style, no big; this one might not be for you.

The book opens from the almost-constant perspective of Sarah, a 15-year-old girl who attends a local high school for performing arts students. She and David have passionate summer love affair. But when they get back to school in the fall, their own inherent differences and the constant teenage-mixed-with-competitive-acting-class drama … splinters things. Sarah doesn’t quite know what happened and yet also knows full well what happened, and that’s pretty much how she lives her life.

I wish I could tell you more, but it really would spoil it, so I’m going to stop there. But the dust jacket does a good job with this description: “A shocking spiral of events catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down.”

I will say this: The book doesn’t read as though a teenager is narrating it. I have read some reviews that say the characters are just not believable as teenagers, but I kind of think that’s the point. Who among us hasn’t looked back at our teenage selves and thought, “Wow, if I had only known then what I know now.” or “Yeah at the time, I thought X, or I thought that I knew everything about Y, but wow, I was so wrong.” That’s what this narrative does. It gives us a bird’s-eye, more adult view of what these characters are thinking, feeling, and doing. Which is a whole thing in and of itself.

Here are some words from the book’s description that might seem overused, but could not be more true about this book: “Narrative-upending.” “Truths that will resonate long after the final sentence.” “Captivating.” “Tender.” “Surprising.”

Read it.

Yeah, not a fan of this one. I thought that this would be a story about two kids at an arts school that fall in and out of love dramatically and then there would be an epic twist. First of all, it was really hard to like Sarah and David. Then you get introduced to "Karen"-this is in quotes because it is in the book, too -who is really not likable but it's hard to figure out what her angle is. Then I guess the twist happens? Seriously, it's very hard to tell what is going on as the book meanders and places suggestions in your head that aren't then substantiated. The final piece of the book threw in a bunch of people that I didn't know-or did I? it was a really frustrating read. I didn't know these people, I don't want to know these people and I have no idea what happened to them. I guess that I finally got a klunker-at least for me. It seems that many have given this a 5 star review.
Thanks to NetGalley and Henry Holt and Company for this ARC in return for my honest review.

I had a hard time adjusting to the stream of consciousness writing style of this book. Not having chapters was unique and challenging to read simply for the fact that there is never a good place to pause in the book and I had to keep checking what had just happened when I picked the book back up. The storyline of the novel was interesting and I enjoyed the characters.