Blaine's Reviews > Chain-Gang All-Stars

Update 5/2/23: Reposting my review to celebrate that today is publication day!

Mari kneeled down and kept the sign high in the air, proudly speaking the truth. You didn’t get to have it both ways. Either we loved one another or we did not.

The front of the sign read: where life is precious

And the back, which fell facedown when Mari dropped it, read: life is precious. And even though the men circled her, the entire stadium could see the message. And for a moment, before the producers had forced the Jumbotron cameras to black, the message had been magnified for all to see. Where life is precious, life is precious, and it dawned on the crowd, rapt and ready though they were for the doubles BattleGround match of the year, that life might not be precious here.

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.