May 29

May 29 Chain-Gang All-Stars

Author: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Publisher: Pantheon
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own.

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.

TL;DR Review

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a searing, extremely smart, and compulsively readable novel about incarceration, the use of Black lives as entertainment, and so much more. You gotta read it.

For you if: You like books that use an imagined near future to look critically at the world as it is today.

Full Review

Whew. Y’all. This book.

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a near-future novel set in the US in which the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE) program puts on a TV show called Chain-Gang All-Stars. Inmates facing dire circumstances can “volunteer” to participate, which means every month or so they fight to the death. If they survive for three years, they’re freed. There are a lot of characters, but it focuses heavily on Loretta Thurwar, who won a massive upset in her first fight and is now one fight away from being freed, and her partner and fellow teammate, Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker.

If you’re thinking that sounds like a sapphic Roman gladiators/Hunger games mashup, you’re pretty much right. But the way Adjei-Brenyah shows this world from so many angles — from the inmates to the guards to the fans to the protesters — speaks volumes about the current carceral state in the US, the way Black lives and bodies have been and are still used as entertainment, the fetishization of violence (especially when the person being killed is “bad”), and a lot more.

Not only that, but the book itself is compulsively readable. Part excellent plotting, part not being able to look away, I was hooked until the last page.

Give this novel the National Book Award, stat.