Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is framed as a journalist’s investigation into a drug scandal that occurred at an elite private boarding school in the late 00s.

The opening chapter led me to anticipate a Gatsby-esque narrative of mythologisation and nostalgia, but that comparison fizzled out due to the book's repetitive self-proclamation as such. The major flaw comes from considerable pacing issues. These issues are predominantly caused by the narrator’s own interruptions of the narrative to provide context that offers very little value to the reader. The result of this is a 500 page novel that feels mostly formed by paragraphs and chapters that are completely inconsequential to the plot. I wonder if the editors had to battle to revise what we end up with from what the author states was a 900 page manuscript.

There's a compelling human story in here, but it's buried under dense, frustratingly expositional, and often inscruitable, prose. At sentence level, the writing is frequently beautiful but, I can't lie, it became a bit of a slog to actually finish.

It should also be noted that the novel includes a number of problematic sex scenes, bullying to varying degrees, drug abuse, and two consequent deaths. The narrative offers no didactic voice on anything that occurs, and this wedges distance and impersonality between reader and narrator. I appreciate it’s a supposed journalistic approach, but that doesn’t quite work given the amount of detail we have in Foster’s ‘POVs’ which are also supposed fabrications?

Overall, an interesting concept not quite executed as I’d hoped.