In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death matches before 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, Thurwar 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."

I thought about this book long after I read it, and am definitely going to reread it. I hope schools will make this a required read. It's not so far off from reality or what could happen in the future unfortunately.

What an interesting, and depressing concept! This really makes you think and I got totally engrossed in the story. Kind of scary thinking of how people would actually enjoy this system.

Wow. This book has me thinking about it long after I finished it. The author perfectly paced the book, and the premise was unique and captivating.

✨ Review ✨ Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Thanks to Pantheon and #netgalley for the gifted advanced copy/ies of this book!

Wow - this is just barely scraping its way in as one of my favorite books of 2024. This book is an intense read and it will make you feel frustrated with the carceral system and, by the end, it will leave you devastated.

Every page of this book is written with great intention and care. A highlight of the book is the footnotes humanizing those killed and placing key statistics around incarceration, an unjust justice system, racism in imprisonment, and the for-profit prison system. This is a constant reminder that even the dystopian setting of this book is built on our current reality in the United States.

The switching POVs between several links in the Chain Gangs (e.g. Thurwar, Staxx, Jungle, the Singer, etc.) along with others outside of the prisons from van driver Jerry to a reluctant fan Emily to guys in the board room to Mickey the announcer, to those who are advocating against this brutal form of entertainment and the carceral system that feeds it. I don't know how to speak about the brilliance of this without writing a 2000-word review, but the way that he shows us all of these angles through these chapters is remarkable.

I'm so glad I read this finally - even though it is heavy, I'm glad it also showed us ways that links were able to find joy, to find self-love, to find forgiveness, even if it ultimately ended in their almost guaranteed death.

🎧 : Because this changes POVs and even crosses timelines a bit, this would be incredibly difficult to listen to on audio, without following along with the text I think

Takeaway: incredible writing, devastating insight into the carceral state, with the only resolution to be seeing actual change in real life.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: dystopian fiction, literary fiction
Setting: not-so-distant future US
Pub Date: 2023

I don't think I can give an appropriate review for Chain-Gang All Stars.

I first fell in love with Nana's writing with his short story collection, Friday Black, which feels weird given the subject matter. Chain-Gang All Stars is a slightly dystopic novel that focuses primarily on two incarcerated women who are fighting for their freedom in a televised fighting series. The fights are to the death so either you're High Free, freed after a specific number of fights won, or you're Low Free, killed in the fight and freed from this Earth. The book discusses so many topics from racism, the slavery of incarceration, our societal fascination with violence, and capitalism.

Nana is a true genius of a writer who is extremely underrated. I will read whatever he writes. This was one of my highly anticipated books of 2023, but I waited until 2024 to read it because I knew it would be a minute until he gives us anything new to read. This book will stay with me for a long time and is one of my top books of the year.

Thanks to Netgalley and Pantheon for the ebook. This is a scary epic that shows an alternate reality where prisoners become superstars fighting other prisoners in stadium filled death matches. This disturbing world is shown from every angle: the fighters, the promoters, the rabid audience and the ignored protesters. Frightening and thought provoking in the sense that it doesn’t seem so far far fetched as you might think it is.

Did anyone else finish this book and flinch for the inevitability of some prison executive using it as a how-to manual?

Chain Gang All-Stars was a captivating and brutal read. The many points of view from people in all types and distances of relation to CAPE felt really helpful in filling in the details of Adjei-Brenyah's future America. I know some reviewers felt this America too surreal and unlikely, but I felt the opposite, and chapters narrated by spectators were nauseating in their possibility.

The only parts that felt off-step were the occasions he took to insert particularly long segments of facts about the miserable state of our carceral system– while the footnotes were great, the in-line sections sometimes carried on long enough to pull you out of the story. But overall the device is worth it given the audience likely to pick up this novel after reading the synopsis. Actually, I also could have used less of the play-by-play fight scenes, which were confusing and for me, didn't add anything to the already-vicious nature of the CAPE games and this world's prison system.

I think those descriptions of Influencing are going to haunt me for a long time.

Adjei-Brenyah's debut novel was a merciless read, but I believe an essential one.

In this debut novel, Adjei-Brenyah presents a dystopian America in which prisoners fight for their freedom gladiator style. The chain-gang all-stars are the most popular fighters and are the backbone of the controversial and brutal Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE) program. A compelling read that forces us to consider whether this dystopian world is really all that far removed from our current reality

wow wow wow, what a read. it took me by surprise and had me HOOKED. like hunger games, but with adults, mixed with WWE, combined with survivor, aka a FASCINATING recipe and blend. i truly loved it, and was horrified by it, and hated it, and couldn't put it down. a must-read, if for no other reason than to be reminded that we are not far from being like this ourselves if we let things get bad. a wild ride.

If you took The Hunger Games and sharpened its social commentary by mashing it up with the U.S. prison system, you'd have Chain-Gang All-Stars. Loretta Thurwar and Hurricane Staxxx are best friends and star-crossed lovers doomed to fight other prisoners in a for-profit gladiator-style tournament in order to earn their freedom. Their battles are fought on-screen as a sporting event for laypeople to watch around the nation. In a heart-breaking, but entirely foreseeable, turn of events, they are assigned to fight each other to the death as their last battle before earning that freedom.

The genius of this book is the melding of a heartfelt, character-driven story along with real U.S. constitutional amendments and laws that expose the prison system as a form of modern-day slavery. In the U.S., slavery is outlawed "except as a punishment for crime." Today, prisoners make as little as 12 cents an hour to work for prison factories and private companies.

I had heard so many great things about this book and it was an intriguing story. I had a bit of trouble with how the story seemed to jump between many different perspectives though. I absolutely loved the build-up to season 33 and the new rule change and how it affects everything and everyone. Definitely a great read!

Deeply unsettling and compelling. It's hard to review, considering its brutal, graphic, yet barely-fictionalized content. I had to stop reading this book before bed because it gave me the oddest dreams.

An epic expansion on the vision first presented in his short-story collection. I admire how well Adjei-Brenyah can traverse the political and literary through his particular expression of satire.

This was a fantastic book. This one stuck with me for quite some time, and I immediately added it to my Amazon Wish List to buy my own copy. I'll be rereading this, not to give it another chance because I already loved it, but to have another experience with a story I found impactful.

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a near dystopian story in which the American prison system has changed to a system that now offers prisoners freedom, if only they can survive through a series of gladiator style fights against each other. Those imprisoned now have the possibility of taking their life back, but only if they are willing to lose themselves. When every moment of your life is televised and sold for the profit of the system, and you must do unimaginable things to others, the same things that got many of them stuck in there in the first place, is it worth it? This book is doing a lot of really great things, tackling so many important issues that are not often talked about, particularly the American prison system, but it attempts at taking on other issues as well and I think it may just be trying to do a little too much. Chain-Gang All-Stars is told through many different povs; different prisoners, prison staff, police, tv presenters, fans of the fights, inmates family members, protesters, and more. And they do add a lot of important perspective, but it also ends up feeling very overwhelming and like too much is happening which is just my main issue. It resulted in a very disconnected feeling story at times, which is unfortunate because I think aside from that, this is such an important book and a must read. The disjointed nature of the narrative did make it difficult for me to read this book which is unfortunate, however with the audiobook, the different narrators aided in the process quite a bit so I would recommend checking out the audiobook if you are interested in this title.

3.75 stars

So when I initially heard the super basic description of this book – inmates fighting for their lives to get freedom while the prison collects the money from streaming it – I thought of Death Race. Well, I regret having that in my mind when starting because this was SO MUCH MORE than an action-packed and mindless read. Battle Royale, Hunger Games, Gladiators – making the fight for their lives a spectacle for the masses. Televised, generating money, making the prisons and government richer, while dangling the prospect of the POSSIBILITY of gaining their freedom.

After reading other reviews and chatting with other readers, the trauma radiating out of this story is something I will only get the surface of in terms of understanding. The book itself was so hard to put down but it was equally hard to get through. It’s a story that is incredibly dark, and the inmates experience unimaginable trauma, systemic racism, and the overreaching power of the government and capitalism.

It’s hard to rate this book, but if you can stomach the above trigger warnings, then I highly recommend giving this a read. The writing is crisp, the story is immersive and emotionally impacting, and the author creates a dystopian world that doesn’t feel like it’s out of the realm of possibility. Which is even scarier to think about.

Chain Gang All Stars is a tough, grisly, and dense book, and unfortunately it's easy to see the parallels to real events.

I really wanted to like this book, but it was nothing like I expected. It gave off Hunger Game vibes. There were too many characters and why so many TM symbols! I think there was a good idea here, but it got lost in translation.

DNF @ 32%

This was absolutely the best book I read in 2023.

Adjei-Brenyah is such a compelling writer, and he did an amazing job with his debut novel. I have enjoyed his short stories previously and I loved that some of the chapters within this novel felt like encapsulated short stories themselves. His characters are complex and vibrant on the page. Adjei-Brenyah gives readers speculative fiction that feels more like a probable future than a possible one with this story that is modern day racist America's The Gladiator.

I listened to the audio for most of this book and the narrators were spectacular. I also loved the sobering footnotes throughout this book that reminded readers over and over again that though this book is fiction, it is rooted very realistically in today's prison system.

The ending was devastating and cyclical and tinged with a tiny amount of hope. I loved loved loved this book and I would recommend it to anyone but specifically those who enjoy speculative fiction or speculative horror (it is horrifying shut up).

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC!

Chain-Gang All-Stars immerses the reader into a story of a world where prisoners can serve out their time, or join an organization in which the members fight to the death for survival... whose outcome in three years will either be death or freedom.

I was hooked to this premise before I even started. The author's note at the beginning drew me in even further. I was fully invested in this book. But the more I read, the less I was interested. I have read many, many rave reviews and they speak of the action-filled story they read. I am not sure we read the same book! I found this a slog to get through and was very let down by the ending. There was such potential, but I was disappointed overall.