Inspection

by Josh Malerman
387 pgs

Deep in the northern woods of Michigan, there's a tower, which serves as the home for 26 gifted 12-year-old boys, all of whom have been raised there since they were babies by a man they know only as D.A.D. The boys, whose names are simply the letters of the alphabet, have been raised their entire lives with no knowledge of the world outside their tower and beyond the grounds immediately surrounding it. Unbeknownst to them, they are the subjects of a bizarre and unsettling experiment. D.A.D. believes that "genius is distracted by the opposite sex," and so is raising these boys without any knowledge that females exist, believing that by doing so, he will help them to unlock their full potential.

While these boys have been growing up in their tower, being taught by special teachers, and reading books and watching movies made specifically for them to reinforce the idea of a one-gender world, a similar experiment has been going on in a separate tower a few miles away. Only in this tower, there are 26 girls, being raised by M.O.M. with no knowledge of the male gender.

But these children are all extremely gifted, and for M.O.M. and D.A.D. to assume they will never figure out something is wrong with the world they've been raised in is naive. In fact, a boy named J has recently begun to suspect that D.A.D. has been hiding something from them, and a girl named K has been bothered by something she thinks she's seen off in the distance, something that doesn't seem right.

Inspection is the second book by Josh Malerman that I've read, and they've both made me excited about him as an author. I've yet to read his breakout book Bird Box. But with its sequel scheduled to be coming out in October, I plan to read it soon. I'm looking forward to both books and I'm pretty confident I'm going to enjoy them even more than I have these first two.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆