By all accounts, Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercise is the kind of book I should have hated. The narrators are unreliable. The author is a bit coy with us in the beginning. Another character is referred to as “the author” is the fictional author? Susan Choi? Can anyone be trusted here? Just what is going on?

I’m not entirely sure what in the hell is going on, but I do know that I loved reading this book and the further I got into it, the more it delighted me.

The book opens with Sarah and David, melodramatic 15-year-old kids made all the more dramatic by the fact that they’re theatre (never theater, says their Svengaliesque teacher Mr. Kingsley) kids at a prestigious and competitive performing arts high school in some suburb in some town in the early 80s.

Sarah and David fall in mad, passionate love for reasons only a fifteen year old can understand, mostly because they get each other’s motor running. Their relationship because fodder for gossip, grudges, and bizarre trust exercises. These exercises and the relationship have lasting repercussions though out the lives of the students and teachers.

This first part about the high school students is pretty straightforward with all the melodrama you’d expect. What Choi does so wonderfully in this part and which felt so very true to me how the teens get very upset about typical teen bullshit — who snubbed who, who made out with someone’s boyfriend, etc. — while they take the actual fucked up stuff in stride, kind of glossing over it like it’s no big deal. Sometimes it takes us years and years to realize the things that happened to us were fucked up.

Then we get to the second part and things go a little sideways. Then there’s a third part that’s even more. . . what? WHAT?

I don’t want to say too much for fear of spoiling things. Getting to these parts made my heart race a little bit and my brain whirred, “Susan Choi, you magnificent bastard!”

This is a kind of book you should read with a buddy, only so you have someone to bounce ideas and theories off of, and hoo-boy do I got some theories I’d be happy to share with you once you read this one.

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My wonderful former writing teacher Dale Gregory Anderson used to tell us that when it came to endings our job, as writers, was to land the plane safely. I think of this a lot whenever I’m reading fiction. As a reader I’ve had a tendency to be a dick to writers who gave me endings that displeased me. I like to believe I’ve become more forgiving, especially if I felt the plane was landed safely.

Unfortunately, Karen Thompson Walker did not land the plane safely in her new novel The Dreamers, which is a bummer. Up until the end, the book about a weird sleeping virus that strikes a small California town is an intriguing, compulsive read. We follow a bunch of loosely connected randos as they watch the town around them fall into these dream-filled, unending slumbers. It’s a little weird how complacent the town is about the virus, but I shrugged off this skepticism because I trust KTW and I was going to follow wherever she lead.

Unfortunately, she led me nowhere. The story just wanders around quietly with any tension quickly dissipated, until things peter out in an ending that made me think What? That’s a ripoff!

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This week I tore through Christina Dalcher’s novel Vox which was kinda terrifying in a “Handmaid” kinda way but with much less rape.

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I’ve spent the last 36 hours reading, thinking about, or thinking about reading Baby Teeth a compact, claustrophobic horror show of a novel by Zoje Stage. It was SO GOOD!

Stage’s book grabs you by throat from the start and doesn’t let go. It starts with seven-year-old Hanna and her mom, Suzette, at the doctor’s office. They’re trying to figure out why Hanna who can read, write, do math, has never spoken a word. Hanna’s on-going silence puzzles her parents and brings much tension into their house. Hanna’s ever more dangerous shenanigans don’t help matters.

The book goes back and forth from Hanna’s childlike point of view to Suzette’s adult one, and it’s so damn much fun to read.

I love books that start fast, stay fast, and give me so much anxiety my shoulders are next to my ears and I can’t tear myself away. The last time I was this enthralled by a novel was Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky way back in 2010.

I’m not sure if the story here would hold up to too much scrutiny, and I don’t are! What I do know is that it’s wonderfully written and fabulously paced. More books like this one please!

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This was a delightful surprise since I loathed Knoll’s first book with a frothy passion. It was such a pile of hot garbage that I think I kinda got The Favorite Sister just because I was in the mood to hate on something.

Bummer for me, because this one was catty, bitchy fun with a side of feministier than thou with a murder mystery thrown in there for good measure.

We learn early on that Brett, one of the Diggers from a Real Housewives of Someplace-esque reality show called “Goal Diggers” is dead. “Goal Diggers” is a show about super-successful young women in NYC.

Brett is the fat, tattooed, lesbian wunderkind who owns a chain of spin studios that donates bikes to girls in Morocco so they can get water to their families quicker and thus have time to go to school.

Brett is the fan-favorite and has recently had a falling out with her fellow Digger and BFF, Stephanie who is a best-selling author whose memoir about being a black girl adopted by a white woman and teen dating violence is glued to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.

Brett’s older sister Kelly has just joined the cast of the show and it seems Brett wasn’t too thrilled with that either.

Rounding out the cast is Lauren a sexually adventurous alcoholic whose daddy funded her dating app and the daughter of a feminist icon, Jen, whose pushes a vegan, hippie lifestyle and is Brett’s arch-nemesis. Brett is a health at any size type of woman and Jen is the skinny = health type of woman

The book jumps back and forth in time and point of view. Kelly tells the present story, the fall-out of Brett’s murder. Stephanie and Brett’s point of view handle the back story in alternating chapters.

Have I mentioned that this book is so fun? Mostly because Brett’s got a great, I don’t give a shit but yet I kinda do and this dichotomy makes me super charming voice. I loved Brett even though she’s kind of a shit. SPOILER: all the women involved with the show are kinda shits.

I really enjoyed the behind-the-scenes machinations of “reality” television plus the extra-curricular scheming of the Diggers. Fame is a heady drug.

This book was just really, really fun with a side of whodunit that kept me guessing. I gobbled it up in just a few days. A great summer read.

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