kjboldon's review
5.0
Count me among those who loved this book. I both enjoyed it for the stories and admired it for its craft. BUT do not read this book if you must "connect" to a character, have likeable characters (there are few) or are frustrated by ambiguity. This is a challenging book that upends itself twice. Midway through we learn to question what went before and put things together again, not unlike what Gone Girl did. Then a coda takes the new image apart and we must begin again, with more facts, but even less certainty. I found it fascinating but can see where others found it frustrating. I appreciated the narcissistic longing of teen lust in the first section and the shifting point of view in the second, where a character refers to herself in both first and third person by a name that is and is not her own. Finally, the short coda that blows everything up at the end gives the reader so much agency to interpret the whole. This is a masterful book.
ajt87's review
2.0
I really tried to like this one, but I just couldn’t fully get into it. I really enjoyed section 1, Sara’s story and was sad when we didn’t get to continue it. Section 2 was a bore. It did nothing for me to discredit Sara’s story. I felt like section 3 didn’t need to be there. I’m glad I read this book, but didn’t care for it much.
trilobite's review against another edition
4.0
I was promised an intriguing plot-twist. *SPOILER ALERT* What I got was a foggy revelation that the narrator left out the actual truth?
I’m still processing this book. At the moment I feel a bit manipulated, tricked by the author. But maybe it’s the reviewers who tricked me? I’m left with a longing for clarity. What is the actual truth about Sarah? Who was she protecting?
The sexually explicit content was disturbing. What makes it even more disturbing are their ages: 15.
Choi is a talented writer, I’m just left baffled, and unfulfilled. I invested an entire weekend reading this book. I want the actual truth, but Choi doesn’t reveal it.
Edit: Or does she? It’s a day later and I’m still chewing on this novel, a puzzle I can’t mentally put down. I’ve upped my rating from three stars to four stars. Some things are starting to come into focus. This book is brilliant. Trust your instincts about Karen.
I’m still processing this book. At the moment I feel a bit manipulated, tricked by the author. But maybe it’s the reviewers who tricked me? I’m left with a longing for clarity. What is the actual truth about Sarah? Who was she protecting?
The sexually explicit content was disturbing. What makes it even more disturbing are their ages: 15.
Choi is a talented writer, I’m just left baffled, and unfulfilled. I invested an entire weekend reading this book. I want the actual truth, but Choi doesn’t reveal it.
Edit: Or does she? It’s a day later and I’m still chewing on this novel, a puzzle I can’t mentally put down. I’ve upped my rating from three stars to four stars. Some things are starting to come into focus. This book is brilliant. Trust your instincts about Karen.
marahk's review
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
cae's review against another edition
3.0
I like that this book follows its own unconventional narrative path. It doesn't do much and it doesn't go anywhere; it has no ending, but that's okay, you don't expect one because it had no beginning either. I liked the switches between narrators, and particularly later in the book, between first and third person. All these elements seem like such no-no's in writing, it was liberating to see these rules broken, and to acknowledge that the story wasn't worse off for them. Very refreshing.
I liked that the characters thought their self reflective thoughts like real people do, thinking incessantly, about themselves and other people and themselves in relation to the other people, never shutting up in this annoying self destructive inconsequential loop that ultimately serves no purpose.
That said, I just thought it was pretty boring. As great as it is, to have these real-feeling perspectives, if it's a story with minimal plot, I have to care, to some degree, about the characters and their fate. The narrators have a strong disdain for everyone around them, so you cannot feel amiable towards anyone, least of all the narrators themselves with their pessimistic point of views. After a while it grew extremely emotionally draining being in their heads, never see something pleasant or beautiful or joyful anywhere in their lives. As someone who doesn't often come across horror that suits their tastes; this comes close to being horror for me than any generic novel in that genre. There's a claustrophobic bleakness to the progression of these characters lives. Never hopeful, always cynical, always hypercritical of themselves and all that lives around them. There is no escape, no comfort.
I wouldn't recommend this to anyone, but I'm not mad I read it.
I liked that the characters thought their self reflective thoughts like real people do, thinking incessantly, about themselves and other people and themselves in relation to the other people, never shutting up in this annoying self destructive inconsequential loop that ultimately serves no purpose.
That said, I just thought it was pretty boring. As great as it is, to have these real-feeling perspectives, if it's a story with minimal plot, I have to care, to some degree, about the characters and their fate. The narrators have a strong disdain for everyone around them, so you cannot feel amiable towards anyone, least of all the narrators themselves with their pessimistic point of views. After a while it grew extremely emotionally draining being in their heads, never see something pleasant or beautiful or joyful anywhere in their lives. As someone who doesn't often come across horror that suits their tastes; this comes close to being horror for me than any generic novel in that genre. There's a claustrophobic bleakness to the progression of these characters lives. Never hopeful, always cynical, always hypercritical of themselves and all that lives around them. There is no escape, no comfort.
I wouldn't recommend this to anyone, but I'm not mad I read it.
kikia's review
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual harassment and Sexual assault
michellekmartin's review
3.0
Okay, I'll start by saying that Susan Choi's writing is amazing. Her vocabulary alone in this book was amazing. I was very excited for this book since I am a former performings arts high school kid. The book certainly turned out to be different than I expected.
We start off following Sarah and David and their cohort of classmates as they go through their four years at the prestigious performing arts high school. We then jump forward to see them twelve years later and see where their paths have led. I really appreciated Choi's reflections on what it means to have a passion but not necessarily enough talent to make it your living, the ways in which different perspectives affect our memories, and the (what I think was) commentary on the predatory nature of older men.
Anyway, overall I enjoyed parts of this book. It's written in a stream of consciousness style which was harder for me to get through. There was much more sex in this book than I anticipated - especially given the age range of the characters. I was a little confused by the ending. If it sounds interesting to you, I say give it a go! It's certainly a journey through this one.
We start off following Sarah and David and their cohort of classmates as they go through their four years at the prestigious performing arts high school. We then jump forward to see them twelve years later and see where their paths have led. I really appreciated Choi's reflections on what it means to have a passion but not necessarily enough talent to make it your living, the ways in which different perspectives affect our memories, and the (what I think was) commentary on the predatory nature of older men.
Anyway, overall I enjoyed parts of this book. It's written in a stream of consciousness style which was harder for me to get through. There was much more sex in this book than I anticipated - especially given the age range of the characters. I was a little confused by the ending. If it sounds interesting to you, I say give it a go! It's certainly a journey through this one.
jackwwang's review against another edition
4.0
Girl meets boy, falls in love. Drama follows in high school drama class instigated by an charismatic and overbearing drama teacher, girl falls out with boy, and navigates the choppy waters of her coming of age, knowing herself, and her continued undeniable attraction to boy. Pretty straightforward modern romance bildungsroman, but then the screen comes down and you realize the first half of the book was the wrong story (or at least not the only story).
WHY did I like this book so much? It's a bit hard to pin down. There is the obvious narrative trickery, which Choi herself admits is heavily influenced by Egan's "The Keep." But The Keep had dull characters that doesn't feel true and never comes alive, plus the "story-within-a-story" conceit comes off as tacky and overwrought in Egan's book, whereas in Trust Exercise, the conceit serves a point, the structure of the story tells its own story, the story of the unreliable and distributed ownership of narratives - no one has an authoritative claim over the narrative arch for the same set of events.
The first chapter is told by "Sarah," who renders a stirring uninhibited account of falling in love and growing up, overflowing with emotional authenticity, despite what we eventually find to be huge factual deceptions. One particularly beautiful Proustian passage renders perfectly the poignant experience of growing out of your childhood: "She couldn’t have been more than eight then. Half a lifetime ago. She had never been tired in the morning, couldn’t imagine what being tired felt like. Running back through the fog as it melted away like a dream, to see her dad leaning out the front door of the house for the paper. Now, she is always so tired she doesn’t even realize she’s tired. Words stall on her tongue. Tears gather prematurely in her eyes. Waking dreams drift and coil through her mind, similar to ideas, but perhaps not the same."
"Sarah" also gives us lush descriptions of "generic southern sprawl city in swamp humidity" that could only be Atlanta or Houston (turns out to be Houston). The absurdly generic labyrinth apartments where even residents get "lost in the maze of carports." Having grow up in the southern suburban sprawls of Dallas, I have a similarly mixed but lucid memories of these surroundings, ones that evoke nostalgia and repulsion in roughly equal parts.
If "Sarah"'s narrative was uninhibited, poetic, and "honest," "Karen," who gives us the second section (or chapter) is a clunky and awkward voice. Karen's story is one of living on the margins. While Sarah (and David) are stars burning on charisma, Karen is one of the orbiting planets. If charisma gave Sarah a clarion voice to tell her story, Karen's insecurities are evident from the first paragraph, filled with clumsy storytelling and silly devices like the "Webster defines ___ as..." trope.
One particularly strange aspect Karen's story is how the narrative weaves in and out of the first person perspective to the third person. Within one passage, the narrator would start with the personal "I" confessing intimate jealousies, and then end the paragraph in an impersonal 3rd person, describing "Karen" who "was always pulled close, on account of her usefulness to him." The effect is jarring and disorienting, even more that we already are dubious of the reliability of narratives in this novel, the reader is drawn to question the nature of Karen's story, is it truly Karen's story? Is it another fiction? And written perhaps by another person in the story than Karen? Is it Karen's story under current revision by an editor? Is Karen just trying to keep some emotional distance when she doesn't want to be quite so brutally honest about herself? These meta questions about the narrative in generally are only answered in incomplete glimmers, a wise choice that leaves speculations dancing in the reader's mind as we build around an implied picture of the illusive "truth."
Karen's story seems to explore the question, "are children children?" Is trust reciprocal in a relationship between an adolescent and a trusted mentor figure? Is the mirror of trust necessarily exploitation in such an asymmetrical dynamic of age, experience, and power?
Although the prose in Karen's chapter is "bad," the reader can tell it is intentionally bad, and bad specific in a way that reveals a lot about Karen's character. Never one to give up on adding interesting narrative devices, Choi even throws in Chekov's gun to mix for an effective infusion of tension.
The last and brief "version" of the story (there are three "chapters" of the book, each eponymously named "trust exercise," the last chapter by far the shortest), is unsurprisingly the least rich of the narratives. It follows up on former themes of trust, childhood, exploitation, naivete, truth... but it seems to primarily serve the purpose of really sticking the message that the sideplot of one persons story is the main arch of another's, that stories are complicated and interwoven things, they overlap, crisscross in perspectives, a messy and contradictory quilt of people, events, feelings, and identities.
By the end, the reader's desire and sense of factual "truth" is eroded to the bone. After falling through multiple trap doors, I no longer expected a "truthful" version of EVENTS to be possible, or to even exist in Choi's constructed work, but in its place, as a reader having felt the authenticity of feeling behind each of the three version of events, one is led to believe more deeply than ever in the emotional truth of each person's story, facts and plot be damned, there are only lies that help tell the truth.
WHY did I like this book so much? It's a bit hard to pin down. There is the obvious narrative trickery, which Choi herself admits is heavily influenced by Egan's "The Keep." But The Keep had dull characters that doesn't feel true and never comes alive, plus the "story-within-a-story" conceit comes off as tacky and overwrought in Egan's book, whereas in Trust Exercise, the conceit serves a point, the structure of the story tells its own story, the story of the unreliable and distributed ownership of narratives - no one has an authoritative claim over the narrative arch for the same set of events.
The first chapter is told by "Sarah," who renders a stirring uninhibited account of falling in love and growing up, overflowing with emotional authenticity, despite what we eventually find to be huge factual deceptions. One particularly beautiful Proustian passage renders perfectly the poignant experience of growing out of your childhood: "She couldn’t have been more than eight then. Half a lifetime ago. She had never been tired in the morning, couldn’t imagine what being tired felt like. Running back through the fog as it melted away like a dream, to see her dad leaning out the front door of the house for the paper. Now, she is always so tired she doesn’t even realize she’s tired. Words stall on her tongue. Tears gather prematurely in her eyes. Waking dreams drift and coil through her mind, similar to ideas, but perhaps not the same."
"Sarah" also gives us lush descriptions of "generic southern sprawl city in swamp humidity" that could only be Atlanta or Houston (turns out to be Houston). The absurdly generic labyrinth apartments where even residents get "lost in the maze of carports." Having grow up in the southern suburban sprawls of Dallas, I have a similarly mixed but lucid memories of these surroundings, ones that evoke nostalgia and repulsion in roughly equal parts.
If "Sarah"'s narrative was uninhibited, poetic, and "honest," "Karen," who gives us the second section (or chapter) is a clunky and awkward voice. Karen's story is one of living on the margins. While Sarah (and David) are stars burning on charisma, Karen is one of the orbiting planets. If charisma gave Sarah a clarion voice to tell her story, Karen's insecurities are evident from the first paragraph, filled with clumsy storytelling and silly devices like the "Webster defines ___ as..." trope.
One particularly strange aspect Karen's story is how the narrative weaves in and out of the first person perspective to the third person. Within one passage, the narrator would start with the personal "I" confessing intimate jealousies, and then end the paragraph in an impersonal 3rd person, describing "Karen" who "was always pulled close, on account of her usefulness to him." The effect is jarring and disorienting, even more that we already are dubious of the reliability of narratives in this novel, the reader is drawn to question the nature of Karen's story, is it truly Karen's story? Is it another fiction? And written perhaps by another person in the story than Karen? Is it Karen's story under current revision by an editor? Is Karen just trying to keep some emotional distance when she doesn't want to be quite so brutally honest about herself? These meta questions about the narrative in generally are only answered in incomplete glimmers, a wise choice that leaves speculations dancing in the reader's mind as we build around an implied picture of the illusive "truth."
Karen's story seems to explore the question, "are children children?" Is trust reciprocal in a relationship between an adolescent and a trusted mentor figure? Is the mirror of trust necessarily exploitation in such an asymmetrical dynamic of age, experience, and power?
Although the prose in Karen's chapter is "bad," the reader can tell it is intentionally bad, and bad specific in a way that reveals a lot about Karen's character. Never one to give up on adding interesting narrative devices, Choi even throws in Chekov's gun to mix for an effective infusion of tension.
The last and brief "version" of the story (there are three "chapters" of the book, each eponymously named "trust exercise," the last chapter by far the shortest), is unsurprisingly the least rich of the narratives. It follows up on former themes of trust, childhood, exploitation, naivete, truth... but it seems to primarily serve the purpose of really sticking the message that the sideplot of one persons story is the main arch of another's, that stories are complicated and interwoven things, they overlap, crisscross in perspectives, a messy and contradictory quilt of people, events, feelings, and identities.
By the end, the reader's desire and sense of factual "truth" is eroded to the bone. After falling through multiple trap doors, I no longer expected a "truthful" version of EVENTS to be possible, or to even exist in Choi's constructed work, but in its place, as a reader having felt the authenticity of feeling behind each of the three version of events, one is led to believe more deeply than ever in the emotional truth of each person's story, facts and plot be damned, there are only lies that help tell the truth.
amiller17's review
dark
emotional
funny
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
wendoxford's review
1.0
I absolutely hated this novel despite its endless accolades.
It captured a true essence of adolescence and was tricksy in its perspectives of narrative, but for me the layers of scrambled histories, dislikeable protagonists and unreliable narrators did not add up to #metoo under the spotlight. Dissonance did not convert to clarity.
The plot device is not new..Sarah Waters gets the reader to adjust their perceptions of "a truth" so convincingly in Fingersmith that this novel felt puerile in comparison. We then had the second part of the story wrapped up in a semi-guise of omniscient narrator who addresses us as "reader". Charlotte Bronte can do this because she glides with the device, Susan Choi just keeps thumping it home and instead of feeling insight, I felt mounting irritation.
It captured a true essence of adolescence and was tricksy in its perspectives of narrative, but for me the layers of scrambled histories, dislikeable protagonists and unreliable narrators did not add up to #metoo under the spotlight. Dissonance did not convert to clarity.
The plot device is not new..Sarah Waters gets the reader to adjust their perceptions of "a truth" so convincingly in Fingersmith that this novel felt puerile in comparison. We then had the second part of the story wrapped up in a semi-guise of omniscient narrator who addresses us as "reader". Charlotte Bronte can do this because she glides with the device, Susan Choi just keeps thumping it home and instead of feeling insight, I felt mounting irritation.