Have you ever heard about a book and thought it sounded interesting, but also thought it sounded too intense so you just decided it was Not For You without even checking out too many reviews or looking up content warnings? That was me with Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It got so much buzz and hype when it first came out, and I liked the idea as a critique of the carceral state, but it just sounded like more than I could handle at the moment, so I passed it up.
Recently it was gaining momentum again. I saw it mentioned in conjunction with “radicalizing your book group”, for instance. So I decided to go ahead and read it, and I’m glad I finally did.
Chain-Gang All-Stars is set in a future that feels not too distant from ours. The tech is a little more advanced, and some cities appear to have changed their names, but the US is still fundamentally the US, and the tech just feels like a few steps up from what we have now, not like, Star Trek or anything. Nobody’s teleporting or using a warp drive, they just have holoprojector immersive TVs.
In this future, prisoners are given the opportunity to shorten their sentences if they agree to take part in Criminal Action Penalty Entertainment (CAPE). One part bloodsport and one part reality TV, CAPE pits prisoners against each other in death matches, but also films them marching between towns and doing community service. They get corporate endorsements. They have fans. They earn points that they can spend for better gear and accommodations. It’s a whole entertainment empire, built on simultaneously dehumanizing the competitors, and also turning them into almost superhuman figures.
Chain-Gang All-Stars is a dystopian critique of the carceral system, littered with footnotes on the real-life history and current state of imprisonment in the United States. While some speculative novels choose to thinly veil their messages and hide them behind metaphors, Adjei-Brenyah pulls you in with a concept that seems ripped from the blaxploitation and women in prison film genres, then hits you with facts every few chapters. There’s no pretending this is “just a fun little book” or “books aren’t political.”
Our two main characters are Loretta Thurwar and Hurricane Staxxx, two fighters at the top of their game who are also lesbian lovers. Most of the book is spent focused on them, especially Thurwar, but we also get windows into the lives of other prisoners, executives, fans, and more. In fact if I had a complaint about the book, it’s mainly that I felt like a few of these side characters and chapters could have been cut to make the book a little tighter. I understand the author’s desire to show all the different ways CAPE and the carceral state impact people on an individual and societal level, but to me, the plot momentum suffered for it and some of these subplots never went anywhere.
One of the things I love most about Chain-Gang All-Stars is that Adjei-Brenyah resists the urge to make his main characters innocent. While there’s at least one wrongly-accused side character, and at least one character whose crime could potentially be deemed self-defense, most of the CAPE contestants are genuine murderers, arsonists, and rapists. The book doesn’t argue that the system is broken because someone innocent might be hurt; the book argues that the system is broken because no crime is so bad as to justify the way we treat prisoners, either in the current day or in this imagined future.
What we call “justice” is so often about punishment, retribution, and making people suffer. I’ve seen otherwise kind and loving people suggesting that someone deserved to die for their crimes. I myself struggle with wanting to see our current system of policing and imprisonment abolished, while also recognizing that we need some way to deal with crime, so those who harm others aren’t allowed to continue on unchecked. I don’t know what the answer is. I do know that what we’re doing sure isn’t working.
Chain-Gang All-Stars obviously doesn’t have the answers. It’s a speculative novel, not a non-fiction guide to abolition. But it actually made me think more than a non-fiction abolition book I did read, which I felt cared more about history and theory than anything else. By giving us a plot and loveable but flawed characters, Adjei-Brenyah makes the abolition movement accessible to people who don’t have the time, energy, or desire to read dense, academic texts. It’s an easier entry point, and I can see why it’s being suggested as a method for radicalizing your book group. Yes, there’s a lot to discuss here in terms of story structure and character motive, but it’s also going to get people thinking and talking about the prison system, and maybe even about our current sports (football may not make its players fight to the death, but it does cause debilitating injuries).
And was this book ultimately too intense for me? It was not. It was incredibly violent, but the author doesn’t linger on the blood and gore. There are rapists, and there are survivors of sexual assault, but we do not see any sexual assault on the page. There is some torture that is pretty hard to read, but overall, Adjei-Brenyah walks the fine line between showing the harsh reality of the situations in his story, without turning it into trauma porn.
CWs and TWs: Violence, torture, police action against protestors, illness, death of a parent, self-harm, mild sexual content, and strong language.
Source and Format: I read this as an ebook from the Pierce County Library System.
Book Bingo Prompts
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): Free Space. I was planning to use this prompt to write a review of Troy by Stephen Fry, which I finished on the same day and which coincidentally has almost the same color of cover. I figured I reviewed the other two books in the series so far, I might as well do that one too. But that would have been a boring review, rehashing what I’ve already said. The more I thought about Chain-Gang All-Stars, the more I wanted to review it, so I’m glad I had this free space to give me the excuse.
Book Bingo Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 23 out of 25 prompts complete. 8 bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 21 out of 25 prompts complete. 5 bingos.