Chain-Gang All-Stars
January 30, 2025 5:05 PM - Subscribe

The thrilling debut novel from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. 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.

Giri Nathan: In This Satire, Televised Blood Baths Offer Prisoners a Path to Freedom
A writer who was up to the ideological but not the emotional task of such a novel might have settled for thinner characters. But Adjei-Brenyah, flitting from perspective to perspective in brisk chapters, assumes all of them easily and fills the characters’ inner lives to the brim, especially those of the incarcerated. These people navigate their feelings of permeating, heartbreaking guilt, but also their wellness routines, fickle romances, creaky joints, fading memories of civilian life, inane daydreams. The society in which they live defines them by their worst deeds, but the writer of this novel refuses to.
Xan Brooks, The Guardian:
Just as most hit TV shows plunder from material that has scored well in the past, so too does Chain-Gang All-Stars, which lifts freely from The Hunger Games and The Running Man, Rollerball and Battle Royale. Where it differs from more straightforward genre fare is in foregrounding what would normally remain as a political subtext. Adjei-Brenyah wants to highlight the factual springboards beneath his flights of fancy, providing footnotes to explain the intricacies of the 13th amendment, the psychological effects of solitary confinement and the 1944 state murder of 14-year-old George Stinney. Chain-Gang All-Stars, he stresses, isn’t fantasy at all. Instead, it’s a nightmarish burlesque about industrialised racism.
posted by Kybard (1 comment total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I was shocked we didn't have a FanFare for this already! it's incredible, maybe the most "I know writers who use subtext, and they're cowards" book I've ever read, somehow an absolute romp while also being heart-rending and desperately, righteously angry.

as Giri Nathan says in his review, both major and minor characters are given a breathtaking amount of space to be human, but it's the major characters that really, really stick with you. Hurricane Staxxx should not work at all as a character but feels miraculously both human and superhuman and iconic. Sunset Harkless gets a single POV chapter but his reputation and the love he instills in his friends makes him as full as everyone else.

Simon J Craft, and really any description of the Influencer's effects, is maybe the most awful thing I've read in a story like this for how barely detached it feels from the extant tortures and cruelties of the carceral state. again, the story uses its disinterest in subtext to its great advantage: this all feels like something a state that sanctions private prisons absolutely would do, and has already done to such an extent that the fantastical elements seem like baby steps past the ledge

"where life is precious, life is precious" almost made me break down and still does when I reflect on it and the way this book proves it through such horrific contrast
posted by Kybard at 5:15 PM on January 30 [1 favorite]


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