Jorie's Reviews > Chain-Gang All-Stars

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's novel Chain-Gang All-Stars is a dystopia of a near-future America where those imprisoned are recruited into televised gladiatorial events for a chance at freedom. It is a thoughtful critique of our broken justice system, mass incarceration, the commodification of prisoners, the violation of prisoner rights, and the commercialization of and subsequent desensitization to violence.

Peppered throughout the book are footnotes on actual laws, court rulings, studies, and prison data detailing all the ways our system is designed to punish POC, especially black Americans. These facts provide the basis for Adjei-Brenyah's fiction:

When racism is inherent to American policymaking, building into itself more and more ways to police black bodies, to keep them imprisoned in inhumane conditions, for for-profit private prisons to treat them as a revenue stream, their labor monetized, how far is our society from forcing the imprisoned to fight for entertainment?

The novel has a great concept, and never does it make a bad point; I just found its execution a little dry, a little lacking. The character work is very minimal, with the priority being Thurwar and Staxxx, their fighting power, and their love for one another. Anyone outside of them was secondary, with some characters only coming into existence when the story needed them, their backstories rushed.

As the book's main focus was Thurwar and Staxxx's relationship, I found the ending to be a bit cheap. (view spoiler)[A rule is suddenly changed, requiring the two to fight against one another. (hide spoiler)] It was a very obvious plot contrivance and felt like an emotional ploy, writing in a scenario almost impossible not to cry over.

While the twist works in regards to reality tv, a genre that thrives off this manner of drama, the book's primary focus isn't reality tv participant abuse. It's about the innately racist U.S. prison system treating the imprisoned as faceless, dehumanized numbers. The twist is too targeted, too specific that it doesn't reflect the actual attitudes that make imprisonment so cruel.

So great concept, admirable ambition, so-so execution.