Advance Book Review: Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

Amazon / Goodreads

I just could not get through this. I made it about halfway and once the story (jarringly) took a major shift in timeline and narrator and things still did not improve on the enjoyment front I abandoned the book. If I hadn’t received an advance copy for reviewing purposes I would have jumped ship earlier. Although I enjoy books set in academia and the author, Susan Choi, clearly demonstrates that she can be clever, Trust Exercise did not hold my interest in the slightest.

The plot of Trust Exercise centers on David and Sarah, two high school drama students at a performing arts high school. It begins in the early 1980s when the two are freshmen and they develop a romantic relationship after an incident during an exercise in their theater class. The first half mostly chronicles this budding relationship in a plodding manner.

The prose is dense and complex and Choi opts for style over substance for the most part. David, Sarah, their drama teacher Mr. Kingsley, and most of the other characters come off as tired and cliched and it was hard to get invested in any of them. I don’t have any problems with unlikeable or even detestable characters (I just thoroughly enjoyed Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask and consider myself a pretty big Irvine Welsh fan) but I do have beef with boring characters, and much of the folks populating the universe of Trust Exercise struck me as uninteresting. Pair this with a meandering narrative and you end up with a DNF from me.

2/10