32. Trust Exercise

Trust Exercise. Susan Choi. 2019.

This is a really clever book.  It is a story, within a story, within a story.  The narrator shifts and could all to some extend be qualified as unreliable. The book is intellectually complicated and from that perspective I can see why it has been really popular.

[This next part of the review contains spoilers, but I can't talk about this book without addressing this issue and since I am not recommending it, I am going to go ahead and include it anyhow.]

But, at its core, it is a book about the sexual abuse of teenagers by a charismatic, award winning teacher--and other adult men--in a popular theater program. It is about how people who experience this type of abuse do not see it as being abuse and often protect the abuser.  It is about how other kids not directly involved with the abuse also do not see it as abuse, even when they know that it is occurring to some extent.  And yet all of this is done within such a complex narrative that it is never fully resolved.  Perhaps this is true to the lives of many survivors, who go through life never examining what happened to them, but I found it unsatisfying. I think the point was to describe this from the perspective of those who experienced abuse in this manner, but I felt like it perpetuates the myth that teen girls lure in and consent to sexual relationships with adult men, whether they are teachers or 20-somethings that they meet and become enamored with.  I was deeply troubled by the lack of resolution or even direct discussion about the harm this does, as well as casting the adult women who experienced this as unreliable, even to the point of presenting them as liars.  

Despite the truly impressive use of literary techniques that the author layers together here, I just can't recommend it.  I also suspect that many survivors of child sex abuse--and people who do not see themselves as survivors like two of the narrators in the book, but who nevertheless are--will find this read upsetting and triggering.  Not recommended.

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