Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi was our book club book this month.  I put off reading it for quite some time because, honestly, I was embarrassed by its bright pink cover.  I read most of my trashy romance novels under the cover of my Kindle, but this one was a library pick and it I wish I could describe to you just how much I hated the cover. I know, I know, you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I am who I am.

So this book started off badly for me.  Excerpt from the first paragraph:

"Eight weeks remain of the summer, a span that seems endless, but with the intuitive parts of themselves they also sense it is not a long time and will go very quickly. The intuitive parts of themselves are always highly aggravated when they are together. Intuition only tells them what they want, not how to achieve it, and this is intolerable."

This is intolerable, indeed. The writing is so pretentious and overblown. What  does that second sentence even mean? But this book won the National Book Award for fiction in 2019, so I'm clearly WRONG about the quality of the writing.

So the story starts with Sarah and David, two students at a performing arts high school. They come from varying socioeconomic backgrounds, but somehow fall in love. They break up. This is the story we learn about in the first part. The school has many characters, from their classmates to this terrible acting teacher who allows sexual assault to happen under his watch to a British acting troupe who comes to perform at this school, but the performance is so scandalous that it never actually happens.

I really, really disliked this book during this section and would probably have given up on the novel if it weren't a book club book.

Things happen in the second part of the book, though. A new narrator comes in an gives a different perspective on the events of the first part.  I thought this was clever, but even here the writing was so taxing. The first five and a half pages are in third person and all of a sudden it's in first person. Why?  What is the point?

And then! Then!  There's a 25-page "epilogue" that introduces YET ANOTHER POV with YET ANOTHER MESSAGE that's confusing as all get out.

I actually really like the idea of competing narratives. Truth is very subjective.

And that's what I'm most mad about! This premise is so good! But Choi let me down, way down.

Don't read this book.

Unless you have to for book club. In which case, go ahead and do it because it will definitely engender a good conversation.