This book is a wild ride. Halfway through, I felt like a frog that had been revivified with electricity, and by the end, I was pinned down on the dissection table and being sliced open.

The first part of this was basically The Breakfast Club on steroids. So much ridiculous teen angst and a truly creepy teacher. I could not like a single character and I did not enjoy the prose. What is so wrong with paragraph structure and chapters? This had so little structure and was so overwritten that I was completely bored by the time the jump occurred. The reader should not have to work so hard to love fiction.

Thank you NetGalley and Henry Holt for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book. This book is in two parts. The first half takes place the 80’s and centers around HS Drama group and particularly Sarah and David then Part 2 flashes forward to when they are adults, and Sarah has just released a book., The first part of this book completely grabbed me, I thought what an opening. Unfortunately, It seemed to spiral downwards about a third of the way into the book. These characters were very unlikeable to me. This book might have been to close to home for me as I was an arts student around the same time in HS. As I write this I am actually thinking that I am upping this to 3 stars, because of the reaction it gave me. If an author can incite that feeling then they have done their job.,

I tried, but I couldn't do it. I had to admit defeat and add it to my very short DNF list at 40% read.

A story about a performing arts high school in the 1980's, the description of Trust Exercise drew me in. It held my attention at first with the love story of Sarah and David, and the eccentric theatre arts teacher, but then it just started to meander without point or purpose that I could figure out.

This just wasn't a good fit for me. It happens to everyone. So many books, so little time - on to the next one!!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Henry Holt and Company for allowing me to read an ARC of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

I have loved Susan Choi since My Education. Trust Exercise is a lovely return to the academic environment, of which Choi has an incisive understanding. Henry Holt is a great publisher of sharp, female-driven novels and this one is no exception. It manages to write about teenage and adolescent life in a way that feels advanced, not stripped of its nuance. Well done.

Choi is a talented writer—Her use of language and description is truly incredible and set apart.

What I didn't like:
Stream of consciousness. No chapters. Random changes in narrative. Random changes in timeline. This is a little too literary for me. I know a lot of people that would absolutely love it for the reasons I did not and enjoy putting in the work to uncover the themes within this book. It just was not for me.

A nostalgic romp for drama geeks, Trust Exercise follows the interactions and reactions of a drama group at an elite high school. Told through a rambling stream of consciousness narrative, and a little salacious at times, this novel is bit too "artsy-fartsy" for me. Good if you can get though it, but not really my novel of choice. Perhaps I'm too old for teenage drama, no matter how well-written.

That was some of the hardest 257 pages I've ever read. For me this book just didn't work. I was first put off by the lack of chapters or even anything to differentiate events. Literally, this just read straight through and the time would jump from one paragraph to the next without any warning. Once you get used to that format, you have to deal with multiple point of views from the same character (sometimes it's an "I", sometimes it's third person and sometimes she's talking to the reader, which irritates me). To me, this read like a string of diary entries just copy and pasted one after another, missing a ton of context, a bunch of loose ends when the teenager stops writing, and no coherent flow.

The story starts with two 15-year-olds who have sex, and are not virgins. There is no mention of being below the legal age of consent - this is all treated as fine. In fact, there is plenty of sex to go around as the boundaries of consent are challenged. I could not get into this book at all. Part one dragged, and the characters were highly unlikable. Part two was marginally more interesting, although the points of view detracted a lot from it, and the short part three seemed unnecessary.

Perhaps some will love this book, and I thought it would have been me based on the premise, but it wasn't.

This is such a hard book to review. It is ambitious, and unlike anything I’ve read before, but I also found it incredibly difficult to read and follow and didn’t quite understand the larger point of the novel.

2.5. I really wanted to like this book, I did. I read a little over half of it before I realized life is far too short to suffer through over-indulgent, self-congratulating, overwrought fiction.

I read half of this before giving up. Sarah and David are students at a prestigious performing arts school in the 1980s. They fall in love but kind of emotionally destroy each other in the process. Then the book's perspective changes at the halfway point, and I decided that I just could not be bothered to try to care about this story anymore. One star.

I didn't connect with 'Trust Exercise.' The shallow characters, arch narration, and rug-pulling/revisionist mid-book shift kept me questioning why I kept turning the virtual pages. I slogged through to the end and cued up Peggy Lee's classic: "Is that all it is?"

This novel has three distinct, and completely unique parts. The first is stream of consciousness, engrossing, and shocking. The second skips the characters ahead 15 years and despite a violent end, is comparably subtle. I think the third part could have been left off in it's entirety. But for the last few pages, I found the novel to be smart and creative.

This novel reminded me of the movie Birdman—not because it includes magical realism (it doesn't) but because so many people found it deep and artful but it just left me cold. It felt overwritten, with endless analysis and telling rather than showing, and the conceit of the first half of the book seems to be much ado about nothing. (This is a tough book to review without giving away what it seems to be about.) Bottom line: I kept reading more from a sense of duty and to see whether I'd discover what the ultimate purpose of the book was than because I enjoyed it. That said, I did find myself thinking about the book at odd times throughout the day.
Thank you, NetGalley and Henry Holt, for giving me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

Although the writing itself in this book was absolutely beautiful, I struggled through every single page of it. I loved the premise of it, but it was so incredibly hard for me to follow or even slightly connect to any of the characters. I had a really hard time even comprehending what happened. The language was stunning though. Thank you to Netgalley and Henry Holt & Company for the ARC.

This book had such promise for me. I love books about teenagers and schools and prefer adult fiction to YA so this seemed perfect. However, I couldn't really connect with the characters and found myself putting it down many times and reading something else before forcing myself to read it. The ending was lackluster and the whole book was a bit of a slog.

The lack of action and dialogue and reliance on exposition made the book much denser than the subject matter deserved. I felt like I was constantly being ":told" what happened vs being ":shown".

I was looking forward to this book based on the blurb. I loved the movie and TV show “Fame,” and that’s what I was expecting this to be a bit like. However, but I found myself skimming through a lot of this book. I really didn’t connect with any of the characters, and I found it hard to even care about the outcome. Paragraphs were too long, and the shifts felt choppy. There was a lot of over-detailing, and that stalled things, as well. It just wasn't a book for me.

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy from NetGalley, but I wasn't required to leave a positive review.

As an educator, this book shook me. The initial scene in the auditorium left me reeling and unsure whether I wanted to finish the book as I was very uncomfortable. The book does suck you in and leave you wanting to learn a lot more about what is going on and why. Could be worth the read, but left me feeling a little off as an educator.

5 Show more
Review 4.5 stars
This is a book that has some structural tricks up its sleeve, similar to books like FATES & FURIES and ASYMMETRY. So you need to proceed with caution when reading anything about it. Just saying it plays with structure feels like a bit of a spoiler, but in this case (like both the books I mentioned before) I think it's good to know because some may find the first section of the book grating enough to quit, not knowing what they are losing by bailing early. Like the other two books, I'd recommend you get at least halfway through before you decide to jump ship.

Now that I've said all that I have the tricky job of trying to tell you all the ways this book thrilled me without being able to actually tell you about the book. TRUST EXERCISE feels like it's in conversation with Choi's last novel, MY EDUCATION. It feels like there are ideas around the power dynamics between men and women, between teachers and students, that she is not done working out. It feels like the right time to do that, the book is timely in a way that makes me worry about seeing too many reviews with hashtag-metoo attached to it, but it really does feel like it's of this particular moment. It is about the narratives women give themselves about the relationships and encounters with men that can leave them with scars of all sizes. It's about the intensity of being a teenager, the depth of feeling and experience that happens without a full understanding of what it means and who you are.

There is some particular joy in this book for theater kids, who will recognize the tight-knit community theater kids form that includes its own dramas and jealousies. It is also a book about the way writers process and change the world and does so in a way that feels fresh and not just another writer-writing-about-writers retread.

I noted in my review of MY EDUCATION how very sharp and amazing Choi's prose and observations are, and I noticed it once again here. Sometimes she has a sentence that makes you gasp from the truth and perfection of it. The style of the prose, overall, can be a bit confounding. It's purposeful, this is a book that makes the reader work, a book that is always aware of just how much it knows that you don't. It can take a little time to get your head straight sometimes, and an entire section switches pronouns just to remind you of its little trick in a way that some may find infuriating but that I adored. (I have a feeling there is a decent number of people who will find the entire book infuriating but I will continue to passionately love and defend it. I love this exact kind of difficult book.)

I am seriously considering re-reading this entire book. (After finishing I immediately reread the final section, which was 100% the right decision.) Even better, I am considering re-reading MY EDUCATION and then re-reading this book. I have a tendency to race when I enjoy a book, I can't let myself slow down and feel it and this time I would like to savor every bite.

Their first day, Mr. Kingsley slid into the room like a knife- he had a noiseless and ambushing style of movement- and once they’d fallen silent, which was almost immediately, had cast a look on them that Sarah still saw in the back of her mind.

There isn’t a drama as electric as that between students of the Performing Arts, as is evident based on the characters in this novel. This is 1982, the students attending CAPA (Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts) are some of the most talented from all around, there to hone their acting skills under the tutelage of one Mr. Kingsley. Kingsley, a gay man with a husband, a lifestyle most of the class has never been exposed to. They immediately are in awe. The problem is Mr. Kingsley crosses the boundaries by meddling in their personal lives as much as their stage ones. The students all ‘longed to live up to his brilliance and equally feared that it couldn’t be done.’ The teens are not quite children but definitely not adults. Exercises meant to engage the senses beyond sight, plunging them into darkness is a catalyst for David and Sarah to begin a sexual relationship, but as one expects from people not quite mature enough to know how to corral the emotional aftermath, things sour. The coldness seeps in as the students deal with Ego Deconstruction/Reconstruction. Much of the time Kingsley seems to play more at therapist than acting coach, but maybe it’s one and the same.

Embrace pain, ‘anguish can be made into music’, learn to be true to your authentic emotions, stand up for yourself. It will all hurt less when you’re older! Learn self-possession, control your ego, ego is wildly useful if you can master it. The problem is Kingsley guides the students to relate their own lives to the ’emotional authenticity’ that acting requires. Teens aren’t ready for that mature honesty, applied in real life situations and why does his ‘intrusion’ outside of school feel like something Sara, for example, welcomes? Then the English People come and Sarah becomes more a theatre (remember, it’s theatre not theater according to him) exile, Mr. Kingsley no longer investing his time, attention nor guidance upon her life. So many of the students manipulate, but they all often seem to be playing parts to fit in or to stand out. Kingsley is the master, using his adult eye upon the lives of his ‘players’. The only authenticity seems to come from Sarah’s confusion and hurt, or does it? There is Karen, dating the much older (and of questionable morality) Martin of the “English People” set, Martin (whom David later admires as his mentor) who has much more of a story in the second half that made me wonder, was I not paying attention enough in the first part of the book? As a reader I felt like I was stretched all over the place and couldn’t fully grasp what the heck was going on. Then something happens to Sarah and no one is there to ‘safeguard her welfare’, no one to chase after her as she both wishes for and fears happening in equal measure. Certainly David isn’t available!

Rush to the future, Part Two of the novel and everyone is all grown up. We meet Karen waiting for her old friend ‘the author’. About that author and CAPA alumni, just how much of her story is authentic? How much of the beginning of the novel is true? How much of what we recall with our memory about our own tortured youth is genuine? Honestly, I still don’t know. I think I lost the plot by the second half and end. Just when I think I grasp things, Choi changes direction and I am still not sure what this novel is about.

There is intelligent observations about emotions, youth, relationships but I think the novel just wasn’t straight forward enough for me to be fully engaged. I have to feel a little less dizzied by the characters, I think I drifted away too often. It was good but I didn’t really care enough about the characters. However, there is very clever writing within, this is a heck of a line, “Maybe it was unfair of Karen to see Sarah and David as twin narcissists, each fixated on the other’s ancient image and seeing in that hapless teenage lover some lost part of themselves they still wanted back.” Wow! I need to read a different book by Susan Choi, because she possess a keen intelligence, it just didn’t work for me here.

Publication Date: April 9, 2019

Henry Holt & Company