J is one of only twenty-six students, all of whom think of the school’s enigmatic founder as their father. J’s peers are the only family he has ever had. The students are being trained to be prodigies of art, science, and athletics, and their life at the school is all they know—and all they are allowed to know.
But J suspects that there is something out there, beyond the pines, that the founder does not want him to see, and he’s beginning to ask questions. What is the real purpose of this place? Why can the students never leave? And what secrets is their father hiding from them?
Meanwhile, on the other side of the forest, in a school very much like J’s, a girl named K is asking the same questions. J has never seen a girl, and K has never seen a boy. As K and J work to investigate the secrets of their two strange schools, they come to discover something even more mysterious: each other.
After the terrifying horror found in Bird Box I was dying to read this book and had high hopes for more heart pounding terror. For that reason Inspection did not quite live up to my hopes.
In a bizarre experiment in which the hypothesis is that knowledge of the opposite sex somehow stifles genius, children who have been obtained by dubious means are kept totally ignorant of the real world, the opposite sex, and are led to believe they grew on trees. The first half of the book is devoted to the boys, and it is at the halfway point that we meet the girls who are raised separately just a stone's throw away. The pace is quite slow and even after the shocking (to them) discovery of the opposite sex there is not much action until the end.
I received an advance copy for review.
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About the author
Josh Malerman is the author of BIRD BOX and the singer/songwriter for the band THE HIGH STRUNG
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