My Cultural Diet

I randomly checked this out from the library based solely on its intriguing premise: a group of young boys are kept in an isolated facility where they’re being raised to be geniuses, except weird things are happening. That, and they’re on the cusp of puberty, which is about to make things even weirder. But once I started reading Inspection, I found it so… extremely… tedious. There’s some interesting world-building concerning the boys’ facility and the experiment they’re in (without their knowledge, of course), but Malerman spends page after page after page chronicling his characters’ inner thoughts and dialog without actually saying all that much. After making it about a third of the way through, I concluded that Josh Malerman’s Inspection is one of those “should’ve been a novella” situations, and I just didn’t care enough to keep reading. Did not finish.

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