This book was heartbreaking and so important. It gutted me, as it should. I don’t really have anything else to say. Just beautiful and tragic and important.

In an eerily familiar US of the future Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the main attraction of Criminal Action Penal Entertainment – a controversial, gladiator style, reality TV program in which incarcerated Links fight for their freedom in murderous death matches. The games are a merchandizing dream and viewers are addicted to the program’s unpredictability and volatility. The magic of the games is in how it makes the audience both love and fear the participants. And there’s no one the crowds love more than Thurwar and Staxxx. The two women are tantalizingly close to attaining their freedom before a series of changes is put into effect that jeopardize their chances of survival.

Readers who are unfamiliar with the current US prison industrial complex might be caught off guard by this scathing, roiling portrait of a not so speculative American future. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah includes footnotes with actual facts and statistics that ground the fictitious characters in the current reality. The story mixes reality and fiction into an intoxicating and dizzying blend.
The story switches perspective constantly from the incarcerated, to the Coalition to End Neo-slavery protestors, to the game makers and executives in board rooms, and to viewers at home. The game makers understand that their goal is to dehumanize the Links, to separate the criminal from the human so that viewers only see the criminal die and rejoice and cheer them on towards their destruction.

The true inhumanity of the system is revealed in how everyone is implicated in the violence and horror. Everyone is a commodity, to be used up and discarded and redemption is found in resisting violence or using it for a better end.

I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for my unbiased review.

10/10

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for sending me an ARC of Chain-Gang All-Stars in exchange for an honest review.

The TV show “Chain-Gang All-Stars” is the crown jewel in a barely future America’s Criminal Action Penal Entertainment program. Inmates facing long sentences can volunteer to join their prison’s team where they will fight other teams to the death. Most of these “Links” die quickly (“low freed”) but if a Link can survive for three years with approximately one fight a month (plus unscheduled melees, backstabbing teammates, etc.), they will earn their freedom and be “high freed.” Loretta Thurwar upset a Colossal in her first fight and became an instant legend. Now, almost three years later, she’s the Grand Colossal and she leads the Angola-Hammond Chain-Gang along with her lover and almost-Colossal Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker. Loretta is just a few fights away from winning her freedom, but will she be able to survive the final obstacles in her path?

Chain-Gang All-Stars is an impressive exercise in world building. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has presented this fictional prison program in great detail. There’s an entire system in place for the Links to acquire points they can use to buy better food and weapons, scouting reports for upcoming fights, etc. There’s the companion reality show, “LinkLyfe,” that draws in viewers by showing the Links in their daily life when not fighting. There’s also a wide collection of characters used to tell different parts of the story. We get to know the A-Hamm Links very well, and some other Links as well. But we also get to know the leaders of multiple protest groups, some of the passionate fans, and the “GameMasters” who run the program.

The story in Chain-Gang All-Stars is quite good. I was absorbed by Thurwar’s and Staxxx’s dilemma, which was not resolved until the final page. I also really liked the character arcs of One-Arm Scorpion Singer Hendrix Young and the Unkillable Simon Jungle Craft. I thought Emily’s progression from horrified opponent to sympathetic fan through getting to know the Links on LinkLyfe was a very clever depiction of how Americans generally don’t think much about convicts, but become very emotionally invested through presentations like Adnan Syed on the Serial podcast (I’ll admit I am as guilty of this as the next person).

Of course, Chain-Gang All-Stars is using this imagined future prison system, with its Roman gladiator/Hunger Games system of punishing prisoners by making them fight each other to the death for public entertainment, to examine America’s current prison system. The book has a series of footnotes with real-world facts, data, and stories demonstrating that the depravity and abuses of this imagined system are tragically quite true to life. The novel doesn’t provide an answer for what a world that abolished prisons would look like, and admits no one has all the answers, but it does lay out the case for how the current system is failing and requires wholesale changes. An entertaining yet also thought-provoking read. Recommended.

Chain-Gang All-Stars is the frankly staggering debut novel from Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of the phenomenal short story collection, Friday Black. 

Welcome to an America where prisoners are used for savage entertainment. CAPE (Criminal Action Penal Entertainment) is a fighting league, where the incarcerated are pitted against each other in a literal battle to the death. Tickets are sold, the rich become richer, the world becomes progressively worse. Our two heroines are Hurricane Staxx and Loretta Thurwar, women at the height of their power and top of their game. As they fight to stay alive, we follow their relationship, and anticipate a potentially devastating conclusion. We also meet the other characters of CAPE; other fighters, hosts, executives, and fans.

Chain-Gang All-Stars is one of the most exciting and devastating books I’ve ever read. Adjei-Brenyah has created a world that feels so real, and characters and situations that are so harrowing. The author’s occasional footnotes, which enhance the narrative with real statistics and facts, land like a gutpunch, and are a reminder that this fictional narrative is not too far from where we are as a society right now. But the writing is never didactic; it is already clear that these issues on race are real, and need to be urgently addressed. 

Here is the cycle I went around numerous times while reading:

“I hope this character wins”

“But they’re going to kill someone”

“But CAPE put them in this situation”

“So this person was a criminal to begin with”

“But are they really just a victim of a corrupt justice system?”

“Oh man, this is all so messed up.”

Nothing I say in this review can fully capture how important, thrilling, and heartbreaking this novel is; Adjei-Brenyah has created something truly incredible. In Chain-Gang All-Stars you will see yourself, you will see your friends, you will see an all-too-believable world of horror, and you will question yourself and your impact. 

Chain-Gang All-Stars will be available on May 2nd, 2023, but you should pre-order it right now.

Ridiculously huge thanks to Pantheon for the ARC of this book.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's novel is ambitious and very inventive—one of those speculative novels that makes you think that (terribly) the future it imagines is possible. In a near future, laws are passed that allow prisoners to compete in "hard action sports" (a clever euphemism for people murdering one another live and on-screen) for their freedom as part of the CAPE program. Prisoners—referred to as Links—who join the Chain Gangs choose to participate are stripped of any and all privacy and forced to murder others or suffer death at their opponents hands; the upside is fame and glory. Naturally, since incarceration so disproportionately affects people of color, most of the people in these government-sanctioned entertainment deathmatches are also people of color. "Chain Gang All Stars" mainly follows Loretta Thurwar, the highest-ranked Link who is also pretty much the most famous, and her romantic partner (and teammate), stage name Hurricane Staxxx. This is a novel I felt pretty conflicted about for a lot of reasons and feel I would have to re-read in order to do real justice in a review, but bear with me as I try my best after one reading.

The mechanics of the imagined future are well-wrought and often very interesting; I won't go into them here, but suffice it to say world-building is not an issue, and I think speculative fiction folks will find a lot to like.

The novel is (extremely!) polyphonic and bounces around quite often, something that works both as a strength and a weakness. Some of the voices introduced in the novel are real stunners—I'm thinking particularly of Hendrix Singer, whose sections were without fail a joy to read. Other times it can feel confusing—sometimes we're in a murky close third-person that changes its focus between multiple characters within a chapter. Sometimes too the breaks between chapters feel confusing and arbitrary—there's a section towards the end where the Links congregate in a small town where the chapter breaks come very frequently and I couldn't understand the logic behind it. Because of the polyphony present in the novel there's also a lot to hold on to. Some of the "side stories" we return to frequently, like the lives of some young people who protest the legality of "hard-action sports." Other ones are one-offs or perspectives returned to infrequently. One character in particular feels consistently forgotten—and even though Thurwar makes a comment to this degree, explaining her own forgetfulness of his presence, I wondered why he was there if he had so little effect.

An issue that feels intricately linked to the discussion of perspective, for me, is the plot, which I also found confusing and unevenly paced.

My favorite thing that this novel does is it walks a careful line, making the argument that even though many of the CAPE participants are murderers and rapists—naturally, this being one of the reasons why the public accepted the program—the program is still wrong, and prisoners deserve, like all people, to be treated with a baseline of human dignity. Adjei-Brenyah is doing great work focusing his attention, with nuance, on an issue that people are/will be very reactive to. This is the kind of combustible subject matter that deserves this kind of attention—many of the main characters, as likeable as they are or become, have done terrible things that many would find unforgivable. There's an interesting way in which our perspective as readers, becoming invested in the private lives of these people, both mirrors and contrasts the perspective of the masses who devour the Chain Gang program in the novel. Ultimately, there’s something to be said for the fact that literature is an endlessly powerful technology for creating sympathy in our minds for people who, ordinarily, we might feel deserve it the least.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ha escrito una novela ultraviolenta desde las entrañas y solo caben dos opciones: entrar en su juego o huir. No hay lugar para medias tintas en este futuro distópico que critica tan dura como fehaciente al sistema carcelario estadounidense.


Una película que sin duda viene a la memoria al empezar a leer Chain-Gang All-Stars es Perseguido, protagonizada por Arnold Schwarzenegger, que a su vez se inspira en una obra de Stephen King. La premisa de este libro es la creación de un nuevo deporte, peleas a muerte en las que los convictos se enfrentan para disfrute de la población. Se ha montado todo un negocio-espectáculo alrededor de estos sangrientos enfrentamientos y el autor no nos ahorra ni un escabroso detalle. Pero lo peor no es esto, lo peor son las numerosas notas a pie de página, que sí son verídicas y que dan fe de un sistema roto desde su concepción, con un sesgo tan claro hacia el provecho como negocio en vez de la rehabilitación que se convierte en un círculo vicioso. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah lo exagera hasta llevarlo a límites insospechados, pero la base está ahí para cualquiera que quiera verlo.

La lectura no es para nada agradable. Es incómoda, nos expone a realidades que quizá preferiríamos ignorar y roza el gore en ocasiones. Además, los flashbacks del pasado de los participantes son descorazonadores. Y no hay una luz de esperanza. Las pocas acciones que llevan a cabo grupos aislados para eliminar la competición son recibidos con burlas por los fanáticos de los deportes extremos.

Resulta especialmente llamativo que se pervierta un estudio para el tratamiento del dolor, que busca anularlo, como método de control de los presos, maximizándolo totalmente. Esa lógica capitalista perversa que retuerce todo lo que se ofrece solo en busca de más y más beneficios se ve perfectamente expuesta en esta parte del libro y en general, en todas las demás.

Un libro que nos plantea un interesantísimo dilema moral, pero que para hacerlo utiliza unas herramientas que quizá no sean del gusto de todos los lectores, por la crudeza de las imágenes que se muestran pero sobre todo, por la mezquindad que promueve todas las acciones, algo tan humano que está dentro de todos nosotros.

I’m giving this kind of a surprising five stars. I loved the premise—two gladiators, Loretta Thurwar and Hamara Stacker, fight to either freedom or death through a near future dystopian prison system—but I also don’t generally love senseless and gratuitous violence and have a hard time reading it. But something about the way it was done here was visceral in a meaningful way that added to rather than took away from the story.

And I liked that, on top of a great work of fiction, this is a denunciation of the US prison system and how it’s driven by both systemic racism and capitalism.

I can’t believe this is a debut.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon!

This was a very interesting and challenging read. Interesting as it tells of CAPE. A program for prisoners to ” win” their freedom. The catch, each match is to the death. Thus, you must win to move up in the “Chain”, to reach Grand Colossal. You win that, and you’re freed. Crimes forgiven, you go back into society. But when is it ever that easy??
Hence, the challenging part. Adeji-Brenyah gives us bold and brazen characters. Broken characters, “influenced” characters (Simon J. Craft). Determined and strong willed (Mari and Thurwar).
Humbled and confident (Sunset and Staxx). These characters give life to every feeling and situation in this book. All of them and more, trying to overcome something, be a family, all while killing or getting killed!
I appreciate the challenge of having to look at our own justice system and the disproportionate racial realities this book gives us. Further solidified with facts of these realities throughout the story line.
All in all, a gripping and enlightening read. Felt to the core.
A read for today, the future, all of humanity. I just wish it ended differently…. for all of them.
Thank you NetGalley and Pantheon Publishing for an advanced copy of “Chain-Gang All-Stars” for my honest review.

Squid Games meets Hunger Games meets I don’t even know what… this book absolutely blew my mind.

I was really surprised, because I don’t usually read books like this, but I’m so glad I did this time.
I love how there were multiple POVs and extra touches. Everything worked so well together.

There is a lot of violence in the book, so readers be warned, but this honestly might be one of my top books for 2023 (even though the year just started).

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC!!

I liked the idea of this more than the execution. A dystopian, inhumane society that finds sport in the killing of the incarcerated has nowhere to go but up. Unfortunately, we never get there. The author attempts to show that there's some sense of humanity in the MC who tries to bring her 'links' together by encouraging cooperation and kindness. It just doesn't fly because all the interactions feel superficial and the relationships are unreliable. There were a few glimpses of hope, but not enough to make this an 'edge of your seat' read. It didn't seem like we ever got below the surface of the main characters to truly know them. The ending came as no surprise.

Thanks to Pantheon and NetGalley for the chance to read and review Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's 'Chain Gang All Stars.'

In the not terribly distant future, the prison-industrial complex has gamified punishment and possible redemption by introducing a gladiatorial competition where convicted (wrongly or rightly) fight to the death in front of a global and immersed audience.

Shades of Stephen King's 'The Running Man,' Suzanne Collins' 'The Hunger Games,' and Netflix's 'Squid Games abound but the focus here is on the predominance of people of color thrown into the penal system and, by extension, the 'games.'

It takes what's still actually happening - the disproportionate imprisonment of people of color and the exploitation of the imprisoned for labour and profit - and turns it up to 11.

The ant-games movement is analogous to any one of the social justice movements we know today so is completely believable.

There's also the battle within the individual competitors who continue to enjoy the spoils of success and hope to earn their freedom while deploring how they're trying to achieve those goals.
I'm writing this review after the shocking collapse of an NFL player, live on camera, in a recent game. Shock and horror were expressed but the next game happened and the shock and horror will fade and be rationalized. In Chain Gang All Stars, just as the exploitation of prisoners is taken to the nth degree, the audience's indifference to death and suffering on screen has also reached the point where they don't care until the see a non-combatant involved - but they're quickly whipped back up into a frenzy by the MC and the demands of the mighty dollar.

Unfortunately, given where we've come from and where we are in society, culture, and politics - this future is all too believable. The inclusion of footnotes and references to real cases of the abuses suffered by people of color by the criminal justice establishment just makes it all the more plausible.

Powerful stuff.

I honestly didn’t read any excerpts or descriptions about this book before reading. I’d seen it on at least 10 “Most Anticipated 2023 book” lists, and that alone was why I was so excited to read this one.

Chain-Gang All Stars felt like a mixture of Hunger Games, Gladiator, and Orange is the New Black all rolled into one very heavy, violent and explosive read. It is a powerful critique of the US’s prison system, along with the profit and racism inherent within them. Prisoners who receive a sentence of 25+ years or who are given the death penalty are offered the option to enroll in a three-year program that may result in their freedom. The program is a gladiator-style hard-action sports team in which prisoners are expected to murder opponents in order to advance to the next level of the game. This book is so brilliant because it’s all so believable - these prisoners are basically competing in gruesome public death matches streamed live to the entire world.

My reasoning for 4 stars and not 5 was two-fold. First, I was at times slightly confused by the intense shifting of perspectives to different characters. Second was the footnotes at the end of each chapter. Much of the info in those footnotes was profound, describing factual evidence about the horrors and realities of the US prison system. However, at many times while I read, these footnotes proved to distract from the story itself.

Overall, this book was unlike any other I’ve read. The story was smart and original in a way I haven’t read before, the characters were very flushed out and I felt connected to many of them, and I know I will continue to think about this book throughout the rest of the year. This story would also make for a gripping limited series, one that I would be eager to watch.

Thank you to Net Galley for the advanced copy.

Not only was this my first read of the year, BUT this was also my first NetGalley book EVER!

In this dystopian world, prisoners are given the opportunity to fight for their freedom through death matches. These fights to the death are televised, popular, and gruesome, and the general public idolizes those criminals that perform well.

The author does an amazing job of forcing the reader to examine and reflect on the treatment of prisoners in this country. While we don’t hold televised death matches, we are quick to dismiss the humanity of criminals. Summarily, these fights to the death are justified because the prisoners are seen to deserve whatever they have coming to them.

This is an excellent read if you like dystopian worlds and are passionate about criminal justice reform. I found this perspective thought-provoking and believe the world created in this book could someday be a reality if we continue to judge people by the worst thing they’ve ever done.

As other reviews say, this is a very specific type of book for a specific type of person. I think that those who it resonates with really really enjoy it. It's different because it's more sci-fi but also mixed with some gladiator vibes. Overall it was an interesting read, I think i'm still processing it but I would recommend giving it a chance! Thanks to the publisher for an early copy!

It’s like gladiator and death race had a baby. Still not sure if I liked or truly understood it’s deeper meaning. I hope it finds its home, but I would really have a hard time helping it find one.

A really interesting concept. What the author proposes is essentially that which happened in Ancient Rome where gladiators, who were criminals/prisoners, fought to the death, with the victor going on to collect fame and fortune as he progressed through the trials, ultimately gaining back his freedom should he survive for a certain amount of years. The difference in this novel is that the author brings this concept into the 21st century and sets it in the USA.

I liked that the author stayed on the right side of the line when it came to not making us, as readers, empathise too much with the characters, who ultimately are criminals. Had they not been offered the chance of survival by participating in the games, they would've been given the death penalty for their crimes, arguably the justice they deserved. They represent the lowest of the low in our society, having committed some of the worst acts known to man, namely rape and murder. Subsequently, I would've had a tough time if we had been led to empathise with such characters by the author, but thankfully this is not the case.

The most original part of the concept is that the criminals are microchipped with magnets in their wrists which cause them pain when they make noise (speak, cry, etc.), this is in order to control them. The imagery of this is particularly powerful in the wake of the recent political protests in the Middle East which highlight once again how powerful voices can be.

This is a morally complex novel and some readers will struggle with the fact that these criminals- who (if they survive) gain freedom, fame and fortune by competing in the games- will go down in history forever and will re-enter society, whilst the names of their victims are entirely forgotten and their lives extinguished. In fact, if I remember rightly, the name of not one of their victims is mentioned throughout the entire novel, perhaps done deliberately by the author to highlight this theme that has been in the spotlight recently with the publication of Chanel Miller's 'Know My Name' and its takedown of the media coverage of criminal trials that often overlooks the victims.

It certainly is a fantastic idea for a dystopian novel and the comparisons that have been made to The Hunger Games are legitimate. Also, hats off to the world building which is competent, thorough and quickly established.

Overall, an entertaining read that I hope will do well in the upcoming series of book awards in 2023.

This would also be a fantastic book club book as it will spark unending amounts of debate and perspectives.

2.5/3 points for concept
2.5/3 points for writing
2/3 points for enjoyment
0/1 point for feeling/moved
= 7/10 (3.5/5*)

(thank you to NetGalley for gifting me an e-ARC of the novel)

I've never read anything quite like this novel. Adjei-Brenyah's first book FRIDAY BLACK was a thrilling debut, the arrival of a voice both fully formed and headed out into uncharted territories -- and hot damn if he doesn't deliver something special with his first novel. The book had me cheering and weeping, unable to tear my eyes from the page even as I might've wanted to look away -- even as I would look away, if CAPE was real. The book manages to be both furious and grounded, a clarion cry against the inhumanities of the carceral state in this country and an intimate look at second chances. There is real love here, and there is unbelievable violence, and there is everything in between. Most of all, I don't see how you can read this and not want to work to change our society for the better. Do it for Loretta, do it for Staxxx, do it for all those whose names you don't know or won't know.

This is one of my first automatic recommends of 2023. I ended up tearing through this in the space of two days. Would again classify this as African soc-fi, because while it's not automatically a rosy view of the future, it focuses on the role of the community, abolition, and support in the prisoners' lives and how that plays out against the speculative fiction aspect of the story. The pitch of this book is that in the nearish future, the prison industrial complex has found a way to not only optimize nerve pain via electric shock as punishment and also to introduce gladitatorial death games as a league sport with the lure of freedom at its end, streamed to the masses. Two middle aged female prisoners are competitors, teammates, lovers, and close to possibly being freed, but little do they know the effect the death of a teammate and an upcoming rules change will have on them. The focus of this novel kaleidoscopes from the miniscule in scope (footnotes that focus on the prisoners' crimes and sentences and the various injustices of the actual prison industrial complex), the emails Thurwar has in her inbox from her "fans", and the wife of a fan who slowly becomes entranced by the league, all the way up to the person who invented the nerve pain system in her quest to eliminate pain and finds it misused by the company that funds her research, and members of the Board, and shows you how it all weaves together. Plus, it's rare that authors will choose to focus on middle aged lesbians, but we do here. And at the end of it, the writer doesn't exonerate the league audience or the reader for being a part of this story, in any way. Pick this up when it comes out in April. You're going to be hearing lots about this and the author, I think.

This is definitely going to appeal to a specific audience. It drops you into the action immediately and then just keeps going, and you may or may not make it out alive..

I'd hazard to say it's more speculative fiction than science fiction.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for the ARC.

TW/CW: Violence, murder, suicide, sexual assault, state-sanctioned violence, torture, brutality, sex, language

REVIEW: I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley and am voluntarily writing an honest review.

Chain-Gang All Stars is a sort of Hunger Games for an adult audience. But while Hunger Games only vaguely touches at ideas of race and inequality, Chain-Gang All Stars embraces that and makes it a central theme of this book. And it works. This is an incredibly powerful book. In Chain-Gang All Stars we follow several groups of prisoners who have joined into a ‘hard-action sports’ team in which they are expected to fight to the death against other prisoners. The far-off dream is that if any one prisoner survives for thirty-six months, they will be freed. As of the start of this book, that has only happened once.

This book does an excellent job of showing how the prisoners have been completely dehumanized by the normal people wagering and watching them on television or in the stands. It does a fantastic job of showing us the inequality in the prison system, and how much worse it could become if we don’t do something to fix it.

Most of all, this book does exactly what good speculative fiction or science fiction should do – it shows us our world as it could be and begs us to fix it before it becomes the horror the book tells us of.

This is one of the best books I’ve read all year, and I highly recommend.