WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION NATIONAL BESTSELLER “Electrifying” (People) • “Masterly” (The Guardian) • “Dramatic and memorable” (The New Yorker) • “Magic” (TIME) • “Ingenious” (The Financial Times) • "A gonzo literary performance” (Entertainment Weekly) • “Rare and splendid” (The Boston Globe) • “Remarkable” (USA Today) • “Delicious” (The New York Times) • “Book groups, meet your next selection" (NPR) In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.

The bulk of the NUBClub discussion about Trust Exercise was trying to tease out what was 'real' in the narrative of the novel and what was just a falsified version of events told by an untrustworthy narrator. The book is divided into three parts. The first is clearly Sarah's novel, a fictionalization of her time in a performing arts high school. The third part we agreed was the most real, where Claire, an abandoned daughter of one of the high school students tries to find her mom. The second part was the confusing one, where 'Karen' meets Sarah and reveals how Sarah conflated and omitted parts of her story. What confused us about Karen's story is that the action of the story seems way too coincidental and pat for it to either be real or not referred to at all in the third part. Are we really do believe that four critical characters from an incident in high school would meet again by working on a play years later as a result of chance encounters? Could Karen actually have done that act of violence with no one in third part ever referring to it? We struggled a lot with a few different takes -- was each section real? Was Karen's story real or her equally-fictional retelling of Sarah's story? Were Martin and Kingsley the same person split into two characters? Where most of us eventually landed was that the novel was not trying to tell a single true sequence of events. In the manner of the acting lessons the kids received, the book was not trying to be true, but real. We noted that each section deal with how sexual manipulation and abuse affects minors. There are so many scenes where Sarah and Karen are taken advantage of, and their own conflicted opinions about those encounters are the center of the story. From the very first acting class where Sarah is first groped in the dark by a stranger and then immediately has an almost feverish encounter with David, over and over again we see a collision of desire and disgust, of shutting down and being out-of-control. In this sense, each chapter is a 'trust exercise' in that it shows a violation of trust, not meant to tell a single consistent story, but to show how this abuse manifests in the feelings of the characters. In this sense, Claire's story is the most true because her understanding and reaction to the abuse was the most clear (as reflected by her name), in that she has no conflicted feeling about what was happening. There was an elegance about the book that way, and we generally felt the treatment of the teenagers' sexuality were well-handled. But all of this ambiguity only worked if you liked reading the book. At least a third of NUBClub did not like the novel. This essentially boiled down to not liking the first section of the book; the haters found it written with an overwrought style, populated by unlikeable and uninteresting characters, and without an initial connection to the book, the ambiguity of what was true and which characters were real or made-up was just annoying complicated for no reason. Those of us who liked the book found the initial romance between Sarah and David to be very well written and believable, with an almost Gatsby level of romantic obsession. If you were on that ride, then Sarah's story is fascinating and that motivates you to try to understand the abuse and follow the story. In the end, this book is a matter of taste. If you connect with Sarah in the beginning, then Trust Exercise is an intriguing and well written book about sexual trauma, confusion, and questions of truth; if you don't, it's a complex and pointless mess.