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.

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.

I'm torn between really liking this book and just simply liking (okay-ing?) it. The structural aspects of this novel were excellent - I thought it was clever and made for an interesting read. I love when an author makes me feel slightly confused for a minute as the story gets uprooted from a traditional timeline and story architecture. Choi expertly tells a story with beautiful prose, earthquakes the world this story is living in with some well played writer tricks, and then lands the reader back down softly.

What kept me from really enjoying it was that I truly did not care about the high school aged characters. I didn't care what they were going through. I'm sure others will 100% disagree with that though. I did, however, like Karen's part of the story, though some parts did drag on longer than necessary. The character development was predictable and somewhat boring throughout the whole book. It wasn't a bad read and I didn't trudge through it. It was just ...eh.

The saving graces were the wonderful prose, razor-sharp observations about what it's like as an high schooler navigating different/difficult relationships and as a coming-of-age adult attempting to make sense of those relationships, and cool structural changes throughout. (See my conundrum? Such important positives!)

Thank you to Henry Holt & Co. and #NetGalley for the #TrustExercise ARC.

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".