I haven’t done a review for a book that I severely disliked on this site so this should be fun. I was so excited about this book, and it just let me down in every possible way. I think the best way I can describe this book is in 3 simple words; chaotic, explicit and unrealistic. I don’t think there was a single aspect of this book that I liked, and the more time I have to reflect on this book, the more I dislike every single aspect of it. At the end of the day, this book just makes me mad, so join me while I rant for a little bit. 

     One thing that I started doing with this book is taking notes on my phone periodically, so the cool thing is that now I have a running list of things that angered me throughout this book. Starting with, as previously mentioned, the explicit parts of this book. I did not expect a book about a high school drama class to make me violently uncomfortable and go into very graphic details in the first fifty pages, but that is just the first of many things that I found to be very unexpected in this book. Honestly, the detail of some of the, how shall I say, adult scenes was too much and just made me want to DNF this book. Sometimes I really wish that my Goodreads reading goal wasn’t so important to me, because I never would have finished this book otherwise. It was just not handled tastefully at all and I definitely could have gone without those scenes. Oh yes, PLURAL! There were multiple scenes that made me want to gouge my eyes out. 

     This book is essentially split into two parts; the first being when our characters are all in high school and attending a performing arts school, and the second being ten-ish years later when none of them are doing what they actually wanted to be doing and most of them are just such losers. But the funny thing is, neither of these parts in the book seems to have a running plot! I know I said in one of my recent reviews that I am a sucker for a character study, but this book just got it all wrong! I enjoy books driven by character development, yes, but they still need to have an overarching plot! Trust Exercise is just all middle; there is no beginning or end. It’s hard to explain, but the best way I can is that there was never any final goal to reach or achieve. There was no big event to look forward to, which is what I think causes this book to drag so much. What’s more is that the switch from the first part, which takes place in the ’80s, to the second is so jarring and comes with literally no warning. It feels like the author just ran out of ‘relevant’ (term loosely used) information to be revealed in the first half and realized how bad it was and just wrote a second half to a completely different story that contained some of the same characters and handed it in. How did this get published? It tries too hard to be clever and have these unreliable narrators, but it ends up with a thousand loose ends and just not making any sense. 

     I don’t know how many ways I can say ‘unrealistic’, ‘annoying’, ‘dumb’ or ‘frustrating’ when it comes to these characters, but there was seriously not even a single semi-redeemable character. The teacher is weird and invasive, the main couple is extremely problematic and way too dramatic, and all of the side characters are so two-dimensional that they are practically see-through. The most frustrating thing though, is that in the gap between the first and second parts of this book, none of them develop or learn anything to make their characters even slightly better! And all of a sudden in the second half we switch to the perspective of a random side character that we have never heard of before but are supposed to empathize with? How does that work?

     The premise of this book could have been so cool and intriguing and it had the potential to be an incredible character study, but it falls flat in every aspect. It is literally a bunch of drama students in Texas in the 1980s; I mean the ingredients for success were all there and then Susan Choi decided to put broccoli in the chocolate cake and ruined everything. I’m sure Susan Choi is a very lovely person and a very talented author, and I am sorry if this is your favourite book and I am hurting your feelings, but I have never had a book make me so angry. I need to go make some chamomile to calm down now. 0/5 stars to Trust Exercise by Susan Choi.