8/15/2023 0 Comments Gifted book age rating![]() The writing style is a little indulgent, but overall a fun read. AND, Inspection has a bloody great climax and ending. ![]() It’s a story of two brilliant young protagonists coming into their own and fighting for the things that they only have begun to realize they’ve missed. If you can get over the knee-jerk reaction to how categorically reductive and foolish the premise is, the actual journey in Inspection is pretty good–it’s a story about growing up, the realization that authority figures are not infallible, or right, or even good. ![]() It is a book that is one of the catalysts for Inspection–one author, driven to the brink of madness because of the choices he has made, decides to write a different book and sneak it to the Alphabet Boys. These complaints said, I did love the way the adults approached providing literature to their children–hiring two writers to live at the respective towers, writing new stories deemed appropriate for the children, month after month, year after year. Or, the huge gaps in knowledge and formative understanding with the lack of subjects like, oh, history. One can’t help but wonder at the holes in their experiment, though–surely children studying science, particularly biology, would have some questions once they start to learn about sexual reproduction of plants and animals and the concepts of gametes and zygotes. and M.O.M.–are depraved zealots who have devoted their fortunes to run a lifetime experiment on human subjects. Then again, the entire point of Inspection is that these adults–particularly D.A.D. It assumes a wholly binary cis heterosexual world, in which there are Boys and Girls and they would never ever “be distracted” by members of their same gender. On the face of it, this is an absolutely ludicrous premise. In Inspection, Malerman focuses on twisted adults performing a generational experiment on fifty-two children to prove that sex and the entanglements of relationships between boys and girls is the cause of ruinous untapped intellectual potential. In Unbury Carol, it’s the horror of a woman who sometimes falls into death-like fugue states being buried alive by her indebted and conniving husband. In Bird Box, it’s the haunting conjuration of a blindfolded woman trying to bring her children to safety from a monster they literally cannot see. There are lots of things to love about Malerman’s writing–chief among his strengths are his outstanding premises. That’s when K arrives–who is not a boy, who is in fact a young girl (a so-called “Letter Girl”) from an identical tower in the same forest, and is ready to tear it all down. in a lie–but then huge, world-shaking revelations. and yearns for his approval… but one morning, after seeing a mysterious figure outside of his tower room window, he begins to question things. If Spoiled, a boy is sent to The Corner–a place none of the boys fully understand, but know it’s a place from which there is no return. To ensure that they haven’t been exposed or threaten to ruin the experiment, the boys face an Inspection each morning to check for mysterious, malicious illnesses like rots and vees, to ensure that they haven’t been Spoiled Rotten. What happens to young men, in the absence of “distractions” ( women)? Raised from birth without any mention of or interaction with females, the Alphabet Boys are carefully monitored for every moment of their young lives. and his cohorts are running a little experiment. In fact, every book that they boys have ever read is by the same author, and his writing is always relevant to the boys’s growth, challenges, and is carefully devoid of many things–like far away cities, or cars, or most importantly, women. By the age of twelve, the boys are completing collegiate-level physics and mathematics, though their curriculum is devoid of history, theology, art, or literature. and their other teachers and minders, these young, brilliant boys–all the same age, all on the cusp of puberty–have grown up in their isolated tower, studying accelerated, carefully curated topics. Inspection follows a basic premise: there are twenty-six boys, so-called “alphabet boys” named for the letters A through Z, who live in a tower in the middle of the woods.
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