Welcome to a near-future America not all that removed from our own, where an unchecked privatized prison system has resulted in the formation of Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE). In CAPE, prisoners fight each other in televised death matches, competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. Between matches, they travel around the country as links on a chain-gang, being filmed for CAPE's popular reality show, LinkLyfe.

The narrative encompasses several perspectives -- protestors, prisoners, rabid fans, corporate lackeys -- but is anchored by two of CAPE's biggest stars, teammates and lovers Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker. As Thurwar nears her final fight, CAPE places a new obstacle in Thurwar's path that will make her journey to freedom even more dramatic and devastating -- all in the name of ratings.

Chain-Gang All-Stars is an unflinching, gritty, violent novel in which Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah uses his fictional dystopian prison system with its gladiator-style death matches to point out the failings of America's current one: the problems with privatization and mass incarceration, the systemic racism that exists (and thrives) at its core. Using footnotes showcasing real-life facts and data, he shows that his fictionalized prison system truly is a close relative of our own. The narrative is brutal and audacious, caustic and riveting.

In addition to the effective, thought-provoking social commentary, Adjei-Brenyah's world-building is stellar as he immerses readers in the system he's created, complete with a complex reward system, innovative torture technology, and cutthroat corporate strategy. The characters are complicated and emotionally resonant, with even the vilest among them inspiring my sympathy at times. There were maybe a few too many perspectives, and the book felt a little long -- but that said, everything felt important. An ambitious and powerful call to action, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a book that demands you sit up and pay attention.

Unfortunately, for me, this book did not live up to the hype at all. The premise was an intriguing one but the execution fell flat for me. There were too many characters, which made it hard to care about most of them, and sometimes you weren’t sure who was who in a chapter until you were partway through it. There were occasional footnotes, which took you out of the narrative flow, an odd feature for a book of fiction. I nearly DNF’d it at about 50%, but then decided to speed through/skim a bit to get to the end. (And the ending was quite unsatisfying.) The theme of how awful and racist the penal system is, was hammered home early on, and it just felt repetitive after a while.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon for the opportunity to read an advance readers copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

This book was phenomenal. Like so many great futuristic dystopian novels, you find yourself thinking "oh my god, this is so disturbing and terrible," and then realizing that the future being described is just one or two moves from our current situation. I loved the way the author alluded to historical atrocities throughout and explained them with meticulously researched footnotes. The whole book was a great study in compassion, empathy, abolition, and what it means for a society to lock people away. The ending was incredible. Would recommend this to anyone. An easy five stars.

Thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor and NetGalley for the free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Chain Gang All Stars is one of the best, most powerful integrations of fiction and nonfiction I’ve ever read. This book is absolutely horrifying, sickening, and heartbreaking. It’s well-written in a way that meshes together the storyline of this fictional world parallel to our own and real-life data pulled straight from historical and current-day research.

The story revolves around a group of “links” in an alternate-prison chain gang. Incarcerated individuals can opt of out a more traditional prison system to fight other prisoners to the death through CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a league of “sports entertainment” that’s broadcast live like reality tv and in large arenas like your favorite sporting events.

The novel uses the switched perspectives to tell the stories of prisoners, activists, and cogs of the machine, and it does it well. Writing a story with multiple perspectives and flashbacks of a timeline can be really difficult and can make or break an entire book. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah proves his skill through the writing in this book, and absolutely kills it as a world-class storyteller of his generation.

The horrors of Chain Gang All Stars are particularly tough to face when considering how close this could be to our reality. The novel really takes the systemic racism and capitalism in our country and meshes it into an eerily familiar path to where our country is leaning.

This was my first time reading Adjei-Brenyah, but it won’t be my last. He absolutely knocked it out of the park with his creative storytelling and strong writing style. Incredible novel, horrifying idea about the direction we could be heading in.

Thank you to Net Galley and Pantheon for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. This novel takes us into a world where prisoners of the US penal system can become gladiators and possibly win their freedom by surviving for three years. Yet, this also requires them to kill other prisoners as their matches in packed arenas are broadcasted on pay-per-view as a sport. We follow Loretta Thurwar and Hurricane Staxxx, women and lovers who are on the both Links on the Chain Gang All Stars, the best. Thurwar is nearing her three years and wants to leave the team better off, to find some type of humanity yet the corporate owners of the games will do anything to keep viewership up and the dollars rolling in. The writing is masterful and the author deftly interweaves our present day reality with themes of racism, incarceration, capitalism and freedom throughout the storytelling. This was a hard read due to the themes and violence (although also well written). Highly recommended, 4.5 stars.

I thought this book was amazing. The author takes the current US prison system situation and combines it with gladiator style arena fighting. It's like The Hunger Games mixed with Survivor and US death row inmates. It's brutal, but that's sort of the point. I'm not going to give away all of the plot points, but my absolute favorite thing was actually the real statistics that the author added in as footnotes in order to make his point. Everyone likes numbers and statistics. Just kidding. I love those things. But I promise that if you don't it doesn't distract from the narrative in any way. Because footnotes.

I highly recommend this. It was on my radar since Roxane Gay picked it for her book club. I am interested in reading his short story collection.

Bloody hell!! What a ride! Obviously a social commentary but my God incredibly well written!! These are some badass women and the manner in which they have to survive is brutal!!! A not so far off future because I refuse to believe this cant happen when well umm!! A strong and solid debut

A fascinating and disturbing premise (which, unfortunately, doesn’t feel too far-fetched) told with grit and dark humor. Unsettling but thought-provoking.

Chain Gang All Stars is dystopian look at the prison system. In this book prison life has turned into a blood sport that's broadcast on major networks. This story is truly disturbing in that the country has embraced a "fight to the death" mentality for individuals incarcerated and we watch it like a football game.

My rating has nothing to do with the story but rather this book was NOT for me. This contains a vast cast of characters, often challenging to track in the storyline. This read is also incredibly brutal and violent. It is truly a mix of the Hunger Games books and the movie Gladiator.

The footnotes scatted throughout the chapters distracted from the reading - not sure why they were needed during the read and not in the authors notes.

Thank you Knopf, Pantheon, for the complimentary copy.

My closest encounter with active-sports is me as a young, skinny, flamboyant boy cartwheeling over meticulously linked rubber-band chains as mother, leading my team in Chinese-garter to victory. Dead mother, dead all!

Chain Gang All-Stars is multitude leaps on a different level. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah paints America’s incarceration system to have become an ubiquitous reality entertainment amassing fans from all walks of life. Chain Gang All-Stars pits willing prisoners to the death, forgoing their sentence, for a stab at freedom. While at it, the players are donned celebrity status, gaining support from sponsors and devotees as their fights and downtime shenanigans are streamed in households. Brewing in the sidelines, protests from abolitioners gain traction.

Think Hunger Games x Gladiator x Big Brother. We follow fighters called Links as they earn kills and rank up from a Rookie, to the pinnacle of Grand Colossal, and finally the most coveted High Freed. Each Links are assigned a Chain, a sort of a team, based on facilities they originate from. The current most popular being Angola-Hammond (A-Hamm) where lady front-runners and lovers, Thurwar and Hurricane Staxxx, hail from. Readers are dropped to front seats to witness Links let blood bloom and also observe how their gears work outside the arena. It’s an all out money-shoveling industry catered through paid live viewing, streaming subscriptions, fan service, and merchandise. Name it and you’ll have it.

This novel champions electric fight sequences, impressive world building, and thoughtful real-talk. Despite its fantastical entourage, Adjei-Brenyah employs a satirical flair exposing the dark underbelly of a depraved penal system. The participation of powers in the hand of enforcing institutions, corporations, media, and the justice system is skillfully depicted as they all influence the game and all stakeholders.

From the author’s note, Adjei-Brenyah says, “I don’t think human beings should put human beings in cages, nor should countries murder citizens”. I am not from America but the Philippines has its fair share of the grueling issues depicted in the book especially in the recent years with our war on drugs. It is comical how we justify murder to curb murder, a deranged adoption of lex talionis (law of retribution), which has a snowballing effect that does not know when to cease. The novel is an in-your-face scrutiny of our society’s penchant for violence, our nonchalance shielded by privilege, our perverted desire for gore, and what we are willing to look over for entertainment.

At the heart of all this, and what I think is the spotlight, are its people. The novel triumphantly humanizes the convicts in its resonant showcase of their honest thoughts and turbulent feelings. Thurwar and Staxxx’s bid to protect their love while finding a path to challenge a system that further debases them is a scenario that easily resonates in the real world today. We are immersed in how the Links found their way into prison and even if some willingly signed up for Chain Gang, others only had it as a choice, a way out from a current plight they could no longer bear.

It is also intriguing to read the parasocial relationships that develop between the Links and their fans, who ironically root for them while also believing that the prisoners deserve to be slaughtered for entertainment because of their crimes. It cautiously pins the fact that despite their past, prisoners are people capable of pain, love, and are worth a chance to reformation.

Even the viewpoint of protesters fighting for the Chain Gang Circuit’s abolition offers a stimulating confrontation. It challenges our ignorant predilection to the false dichotomy of good and bad, that there is only the innocent and the damned. Criminals do great harm but that is mirrored in a system that does not address the very reasons why these people resorted to their ruination—racism, socio-economic inequity, unbridled capitalism, volleys of power, and more. In a way, we are complicit for not challenging a forced status quo as it is easier to be comfortable in one’s glass bubble.

To offer a moral soup that might scorch your very tongue is one thing but Adjei-Brenyah’s prose is not one to preach. There is a deeper philosophical jest—catalyzing the rhetoric and allowing the reader to examine their own values as the story unspools the tight coils of degenerating humanity. Chain Gang All-Stars is disturbingly grim but ends in a hopeful melancholy. It is one that leaves an important uncomfortable feeling; a crack cradling seeds that would grow into the very things that will break the chains that bind us.

in CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS, nana kwame adjei-brenyah crafts a distant future dystopia of technologically advanced, corporate-controlled gladiator fighting between chains of incarcerated people across the US, where the most desperate inmates risk violent, public execution for a miniscule chance at freedom in a country where their lives and deaths are served up to the masses as a flashy, lucrative entertainment spectacle via reality tv feeds and arena matches. CHAIN-GANG partially follows two of it’s biggest stars, loretta thurwar and hurricane staxxx, queer black women navigating a system intent on their destruction while upholding their commitments to each other and to their chain.

adjei-brenyah is deeply invested in world building: every page of this book is peppered with descriptions of technology, acronyms, rules and regulations, corporate machinations - not to mention plenty of long footnotes that provide factual legal and historical context. structurally, there are 8+ perspectives introduced across 60 (!!) chapters and multiple subsections, where the reader jumps hurriedly across places, timelines, and POVs. it often felt like i had whiplash, the constant shifting chaotic and haphazard. i had a tough time investing in any aspect of this book when chapters were quick blips, and it was anyone's guess when we would return to that plotline or character.

what i was expecting was an emotionally searing look at the heartbreaking upshot of a warped carceral state, and what i got was...flatline, unsubtle, and tell-y. there were too many uninteresting POVs; character depth was sacrificed to breadth. it wasn't layered, just cluttered. a strong editor could’ve separated the wheat from the chaff so that the best perspectives (imo loretta, staxx, and their chain) got more time to shine. it was frustrating to have the emotional impact of gut-wrenching, BRUTAL scenes be so tempered.

billed as a fiery refutation of mass incarceration and a powerful polemic for modern prison abolitionists, i'm THRILLED that this book has the potential to open eyes and change minds for certain readers. it just wasn't that book for me.

4.5 stars

Thank you @pantheonbooks and @PRHAudio for the complimentary ARC and audiobook.

It has been some time since I’ve read and loved a Dystopian novel. Chain-Gang All-Stars is excellent, you will love and hate the characters and be broken hearted by the situations they are forced into. But it’s not just dystopian fiction, throughout the novel are eye-opening facts relating to today’s legal and prison system. They are woven so perfectly into the story that it adds depth to the characters and their situation, while also making you stop and think about our current reality. I mostly listened to this, but I would recommend the physical book over the audio. Here is where the half star was lost for me. While overall all of the narrators were phenomenal, there is one character who is from Trinidad and the accent was not done well… at all. It was jarring to listen to and ruined those parts of the audio for me. I would prefer a narrator to not do an accent at all, rather than do one poorly.

DNF at 25%

Unfortunately this was not for me. I loved the concept. However, I just struggled in following along. Really cool characters, but I just couldn't immerse myself into this futuristic world enough to be able to understand and keep reading.

I've heard so many great things but this wasn't for me.

This book is written in a unique, literary voice. It strongly parallels the current American social climate, especially the prison system. The author showed it from a new angle, resulting in a deeper understanding of the book.
This is not an action-packed book the reader would find enjoyable. The book is heavy and would most likely make many people uncomfortable. The author is pushing us, readers, out of our comfort bubbles, and for this reason alone the book is a must-read.
I really wanted to know more about people on the outside, the protestors, and how the "show" even became a thing. My favorite part of the book structure was the footnotes, I think that was a brilliant way to add social commentary and explanation.
I hope we will see more books from this author,

The prepublication buzz around this book has been nearly deafening and it certainly has been one of the titles I was most excited about this year. One line tags have called this an adult Hunger Games but I feel it’s a closer match to the wildly popular Netflix series #SquidGame where contestants play for the chance at millions of dollars to fight to the death. Here, author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah places his blood matches in the world of the prison system, contestants choosing to battle their way to freedom in televised death matches that are sponsored by major corporations, and scare up huge business as contestants become icons, and watching brutal killings a national pastime. These ‘links’ in the chain gang are who we’re really here to see, and at the center are Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx”. Thurwar has reached the final level and is so close to freedom she can taste it. Staxxx is her right hand, confidant, battle partner and lover. This is where his book sang to me.

Every time the narrative moved with them I was absolutely captivated, drawn into their relationship which was a welcome respite after being surrounded by so much brutality. Where the book lost me, was much of the rest of it. Filled with a myriad of other characters that aren’t restricted to the ‘links’ on the chain had me scratching my head early on trying to keep everyone straight. Moreover because there were such a large number of people, I found it hard to really care about many of them as their demises seemed as fast as their backstories. There’s no denying the book is powerful and Adjei-Brenyah’s dystopian vision is a brilliant way of showing the horrors of mass incarceration. I just wish I felt for the rest of them the way I did the two female leads. Thanks to pantheon books for the advance copy !

In a future world, prisoners who receive a sentence of 25+ years are offered enrolling into a 3 year program that may result in the possibility of winning their way to freedom. The program is sport game where prisoners murder each other at different levels. You either win, die, or stay a prisoner.

These “games” are televised for everyone in America to watch where there people can take bets and there’s also promotions where businesses of course, capitalize on it.

This reminded me a lot of The Hunger Games (but adult) with the class divide but with more of a focus on race and gender. Theres more than just the dystopian, there are literary vibes so we get to know the stories of the characters but there are way too many of them so I began to get lost. That being said, I think the story was too long as well.

If this was shorter it would’ve definitely been stronger but I’m very picky on the length of books these days and this is almost always on my list of complaints. So maybe this is a me thing.

Overall, if this sounds interesting to you I think it’s worth the read! Thank you to Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book.

Chain-Gang All-Stars – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

It was all death, slow or fast. Painful or sudden. Nothing more. The culture of Chain-Gang was death.

HUGE thanks to @netgalley and @penguinrandomhouse for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

In a near-future USA, there has been a revolution in the prison system: privatization. With this comes CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a globally popular TV show where prisoners with long terms are given the “opportunity” to fight to the death. Win enough fights, and you earn your freedom. Lose just once, and you achieve a different freedom: “low freedom”.

The current stars of this show are Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx”, members of the same Chain-Gang, teammates and lovers, both close to achieving freedom. Both are fascinating characters, but Thurwar is an incredible creation, someone struggling to deal with the trappings of fame in a horrific system, thinking of how to bring down a system that constantly rewards her for brutality and bringing in profits for the company. I really liked this line about her role in the show:

“Her survival made the impossible game seem possible. Of course they were foolish and misguided and would end up dead. But in her weaker moments she enjoyed being a beacon. When she was strong she knew she was a flame to moths”.

It’s rare to find a book (at least for me) that nails both plot and character, but Adjei-Brenyah really has a grasp of both, helped hugely by the intricate world-building which allows the characters to breathe. There are a decent number of arcs of numerous characters and we see views from many facets of this new world. Protests groups form, led by the children of downed CAPE participants. Fans get drawn into the slickly presented sports world, bonding with the warriors while still reviling them for the crimes they committed. Some other prisoners are highlighted as well, and I dare you not to be touched by Simon Jungle Craft and Hendrix Young.

Where this book really hammers the nail home, however, is its satire and drawn parallels to the real prison system of America. The book is littered with facts and figures which show that this hyper-violent Hunger Games world is not so far from reality, and is able to do what all great sci-fi speculative fiction should do: show a real-life problem or issue, magnify the issues, and show the flaws.

Having read “Friday Black” earlier in the year, I expected I would like this, but it’s always tricky to go from short stories to a novel, to fully flesh out characters and plots. I needn’t have worried. I loved this book, from the people to the world to the message. I can see some people not liking this – the book jumps around a lot, and it’s brutal at points, but all of that was essential to the story for me. It’s an angry book, rightfully so, and one I urge people to check out. Joining the chorus of positivity on this one.

It's already on order for my library. I have no words besides this is a phenomenal book. It takes on so much and so well. I'll be thinking about this one for the rest of the year.

The book starts strong with a unique premise but it quickly lost steam for me because I didn’t enjoy how the book was presented.

The unclear narrator(s), ambiguous timeline, and lack of focus to bring it all together in order for me to enjoy what I was reading never came, so I DNF’d it at almost 50% - hey, at least I really tried.

I absolutely loved this book!! It was both brutal and eye opening. I loved the footnotes, some fictitious some factual. This would be a fantastic book club pick. It is a challenging read with many characters to keep up with. A diagram of the chain would have been very helpful. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️