Review: 4.5 stars
This one was recommended by my sister, who I trust with book recommendations wholeheartedly.
Trust Exercise follows Sarah and David, two impressionable drama students at an elite performing arts high school. They are pushed to their full potential by Mr. Kingsley, a teacher who humiliates his students in order to hone their acting into a sharp weapon. The first part of the book is extremely readable - the romantic tension between Sarah and David, the mystique of Kingsley and his inappropriate closeness to his students. It's a magnetic story.
But what makes this book truly amazing is the reframe in the second part, when you find out that Sarah has written a novel about her own past life, and in doing so has leveraged Karen's lived experience, rounding off its edges, and turning it into a bestselling novel. Karen's real life tragedy is expunged from Sarah's narrative, and she is relegated to a supporting character in Sarah's novel, but the source material is Karen's onw life. Suddenly the book isn't about what you thought it was about at all.
What's fascinating is how many angles of trust Choi explores. Most literally through the trust exercises themselves, which wring such extreme truths out of these kids that embarrassment becomes a bonding agent, tying the students to Kingsley with something close to hostage-level loyalty. Then the deeper, thornier question: who can be trusted with your story? What happens to the truth of what you lived when someone else remembers it differently, or appropriates it outright and reshapes it?
And then the third part arrives, with its unknown woman, and casts the first two parts into chaotic relief. Choi leaves it unresolved, and you begin to question everything. Who really owns this story? Are Sarah and Karen actually two sides of the same person? Can you even trust your own memory, or do traumatic experiences force you to compartmentalize, splitting your lived experience as a coping mechanism, a way to rebuild trust in yourself?
At face value this is an easy, propulsive, compelling novel. But if you choose to follow the rabbit hole, it becomes extremely cerebral. That duality is what makes it brilliant: it forces you to question every facet of trust, starting with the trust you placed in the narrator on page one.