Trust Exercise

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.

"[Choi's] finest novel... exposing tenuous connections between fiction, truth, lies, and, of course, people. Literary deception rarely reads this well."   -  Booklist

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.  

"Choi’s new novel, her fifth, is titled Trust Exercise, and it burns more brightly than anything she’s yet written. This psychologically acute novel enlists your heart as well as your mind. Zing will go certain taut strings in your chest... Choi builds her novel carefully, but it is packed with wild moments of grace and fear and abandon... She catches the way certain nights, when you are in high school, seem to last for a month — long enough to sustain entire arcs of one’s life ..."  - Dwight Garner, The New York Times