Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise (Holt, $27) is a novel that ideally requires a clear schedule and a close friend to read along with—it demands your time and attention, and absolutely deserves it. Trust Exercise, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, follows a group of students at a competitive performing arts high school as they move from adolescence to adulthood. There are rivalries, complicated power dynamics, questionable teaching ethics, teenage lust, and a particularly unruly group of British actors. It feels appropriate that the novel is split into two halves, as the overall story is primarily concerned with dualities: on-stage versus off-stage personas, exterior versus interior lives, artifice versus vulnerability. But Choi deftly takes apart those dualities and the result is an incredibly satisfying reading experience, filled with turns and reexaminations. Trust Exercise is a singular book from a master storyteller.
