Trust Exercise

The title names the actual pedagogy: Kingsley's acting-class exercises — falling backward into a classmate's arms, holding a stranger's gaze until it stops being comfortable, learning to discard your defenses "for the work" — are the same vocabulary a predator uses to normalize a teenager surrendering her boundaries. Choi writes the Sarah-and-David section in a lush, hyper-attentive free indirect style that reads, on a first pass, like an unusually good teen romance; the horror is retroactive, arriving once you realize the intimacy you were enjoying was staged and cultivated inside a classroom culture one adult built and fed on.

The second section doesn't just add information, it reassigns authorship: a classmate's account, written decades later, takes back a story that had been told about her without her consent, and in doing so makes the novel's real subject narrative custody rather than adolescence. Power in Trust Exercise isn't only what happens in the rehearsal room — it's who gets to write the official version afterward, whose memory outranks whose, and how a beautifully rendered scene can itself be an instrument of control.

The competitive performing-arts high school itself does structural work: an institution built to reward emotional exposure as a marker of serious talent gives Kingsley cover, since any student who balks at his methods risks being read as untalented or unserious rather than as someone whose boundaries are being crossed. That conflation of suffering with artistry is what makes the abuse so hard for the students themselves to name at the time, and it's why the novel needs the distance of adulthood, and a second narrator, before anyone can call it what it was.

Choi's structural rupture performs on the reader exactly what Kingsley performs on his students: it seduces you into trusting a familiar mode — the intimate, sensorially rich coming-of-age novel — before revealing that the trust was the point of vulnerability all along. Readers who complained the second section "ruined" the first are, whether they notice it or not, proving the book's argument: an appetite for a certain kind of teenage-romance story is exactly what let the original manipulation go unread as manipulation in the first place.

That formal ambush is also why Trust Exercise resists being filed as a straightforward #MeToo narrative. It isn't interested in delivering a clean villain and a clean verdict; it's interested in how a story about that villain gets constructed, contested, and revised by the people who lived it, which makes the reader's own certainty about what "really" happened exactly as unstable as the characters'.