A review by kjboldon
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

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.