Books › Trust Exercise
National Book Award for Fiction 2019
Trust Exercise
433 pages
A heady, theatrical dive into adolescent passion and power dynamics that brilliantly shatters its own reality.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like stepping into a hothouse, intense, claustrophobic, and thick with the heady drama of adolescent ambition. The narrative initially wraps you in the insular, high-stakes bubble of a competitive arts environment, where every emotion is magnified and every relationship feels like a performance. As the story unfolds, the steady, observant prose lulls you into a false sense of security before executing a breathtaking structural pivot. The mood shifts from nostalgic and theatrical to deeply unsettling, forcing you to question the very nature of truth, memory, and manipulation. It is a brilliant, provocative puzzle of a book that will delight readers who love literary fiction that challenges their perceptions and leaves a lingering, resonant impact long after the final page.
- Mood
- claustrophobic
- theatrical
- unsettling
- heady
- Tone
- observant
- intense
- provocative
- unreliable
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- adolescent intensity · manipulation of power · truth versus fiction · artistic ambition · the weight of memory
- The writing
- Literary and meticulously crafted, building a vivid, immersive reality before deliberately pulling the rug out from under the reader.
- The arc
- Moves from the heady, insular intoxication of teenage romance into a disorienting and shocking confrontation with manipulated truths.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave structural puzzles, unreliable narratives, and intense psychological dramas set in high-pressure environments.
Content notes
- manipulation by an authority figure
- academic pressure
- adolescent relationship dynamics
About the book
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.
The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence.
Description from Open Library.
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