Trust Exercise by Susan Choi

I have to start off by saying I'm usually pretty uncomfortable writing reviews for books I didn't enjoy. Is there such a thing as a bad book? I have my doubts. It's more of a preference thing. Unfortunately, throughout this book, I would have preferred to be reading something else, but that obviously doesn't mean that another reader won't see it in a completely different light.

It's not that the plot is bad. To simplify, it's about a group of students that attend a private arts high school and the relationships they have with each other and their eccentric teachers. The premise is actually a pretty interesting one and there's a unique twist in the second part of the book where things in the first part are not entirely as they appear. Unfortunately, the plot twist still wasn't enough to keep me interested. My main problem with this book was that I found all of the characters unlikeable. Weird, since there were quite a number of them, so odds are that I'd have some interest in at least one or two of them, right? Unfortunately, that just wasn't the case. For the most part, I found them unbelievable and annoying and a couple of the characters I was drawn to in Part One of the book seemed to do an about-face by the second half, cutting the one or two threads that tenuously held me to them in the first place. It's hard to want to keep reading when you just don't care what happens to anyone, but from reading the jacket, I knew there was this big plot twist that was supposed to happen and by the time it arrived, I was already halfway through the book so I felt the need to keep going until the end.

I also found the writing style confusing. In the third part of the book (the book is divided into three sections), it took me about thirteen pages to figure out who was talking and what was going on. The points of view change in each section, which in itself isn't an issue, but it got a little muddled at the beginning of the second and third parts for me. It was overly wordy and overexplanatory without actually helping me figure out what was happening with any ease. I also found the middle part extremely grating to read - the main character in Part Two breaks down all of her feelings into literal dictionary definitions. Using this technique once would have felt a bit clunky, but to have it used over and over again started to get annoying. There was a reason the character did this, but nevertheless, I just found it cringey.

So, all in all, this one wasn't a winner for me. My favourite part of the book was the graphic design on the cover, so I'm interested to read some positive reviews to see if I can gain any insight into what others took away from the same book.

Judge the cover: 4/5