Trust Exercise (Choi) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Choi's new novel, her fifth, is titled Trust Exercise, and it burns more brightly than anything she's yet written. This psychologically acute novel enlists your heart as well as your mind. Zing will go certain taut strings in your chest…Choi builds her novel carefully, but it is packed with wild moments of grace and fear and abandon. She catches the way certain nights, when you are in high school, seem to last for a month—long enough to sustain entire arcs of one's life.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


Choi’s voice blends an adolescent’s awe with an adult’s irony. It’s a letter-perfect satire of the special strain of egotism and obsession that can fester in academic settings.… [Choi is] a master of emotional pacing: the sudden revelation, the unexpected attack.… How cunningly this novel considers the way teenage sexuality is experienced, manipulated, and remembered.… The result is a dramatic exploration of the distorting forces of memory, envy, and art.… You won’t be disappointed.
Washington Post


Susan Choi’s thrilling new novel, Trust Exercise, is a rare and splendid literary creature: piercingly intelligent, engrossingly entertaining, and so masterfully intricate that only after you finish it, stunned, can you step back and marvel at the full scope of its unshowy achievements.
Boston Globe


Immerses the reader in the suffocating hothouse atmosphere of a 1980s performing arts high school and all the intense drama, heartbreak, and scandal many remember from their teen years.
Los Angeles Times


In her masterful, twisty [novel], Susan Choi upgrades the familiar coming-of-age story with remarkable command… [displaying her] talent for taking ineffable emotions and giving them an oaken solidity.… So many books and films present teenage years as a passing phase, a hormonal storm that passes in time. Choi, in this witty and resonant novel, thinks of it more like an earthquake―a rupture that damages our internal foundations and can require years to repair.
USA Today


Book groups, meet your next selection.… Trust Exercise is fiction that contains multiple truths and lies. Working with such common material, Choi has produced something uncommonly thought-provoking.
NPR


A twisting feat of storytelling.… [Choi] uses language brilliantly.… She is an astute, forensic cartographer of human nature; her characters are both sympathetic and appalling. In the end, [Trust Exercise] is a tale of missed connection and manipulation―and of willing surrender to the lure and peril of the unknown.
Economist


An intelligent and layered portrait of a school’s legacy.… [Trust Exercise] makes something dramatic and memorable from the simple elements of a teen movie.
The New Yorker


Mind-bending.… A Gen-X bildungsroman that speaks to young generations, a Russian nesting doll of unreliable narrators, and a slippery #MeToo puzzle-box about the fallibility of memory.… [A] perfectly stitched together Frankenstein’s monster of narrative introspection and ambiguity.… It flexes its own meta-existence―as a novel about the manipulation inherent in any kind of narrative―brilliantly.
New York Magazine


Perhaps the best [novel] this year.… [Trust Exercise] begins as an enthralling tale of teenage romance and then turns into a meticulously plotted interrogation of the state of the novel itself.… Read it once for pleasure, and then again to turn up all the brilliant Easter eggs.
Vulture


Electrifying.… [A] story that cuts to the heart of gender politics and the teacher-student dynamic.
People


A gonzo literary performance one could mistake for a magic trick, duping its readers with glee before leaving them impossibly moved.… Facts are debated in Trust Exercise, yes, but Choi always tells the truth.
Entertainment Weekly


(Starred review) Superb, powerful.… Choi’s themes—among them the long reverberations of adolescent experience, the complexities of consent and coercion, and the inherent unreliability of narratives—are timeless and resonant. Fiercely intelligent, impeccably written, and observed with searing insight, this novel is destined to be a classic.
Publishers Weekly


[N]either sentimentalizes nor trivializes the emotional lives of the teens.… [T]he first half of the novel feels "truer" than the more contrived… second half…. The latter retrospective approach serves best in examining the confusion and ambiguity of teenage sexuality and how that can be exploited. —Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal


(Starred review) [Choi’s] finest novel.… Trust Exercise should immediately put readers on alert… exposing tenuous connections between fiction, truth, lies, and, of course, people. Literary deception rarely reads this well.
Booklist


(Starred review) [A] story of obsessive first love… twists into something much darker in Choi's singular new novel.… The writing (exquisite) and the observations (cuttingly accurate) make Choi's latest both wrenching and one-of-a-kind. Never sentimental; always thrillingly alive.
Kirkus Reviews