Reviews

With Chain-Gang All-Stars Adjei-Brenyah has leveled his gaze upon the insatiable beast of our modern day prison industrial complex, and with the added benefit of the heightened extremity of dystopian fiction, does his best to lay bare the way our country (this is a very American Novel, though I'm sure it is not entirely inapplicable elsewhere) dehumanizes and violates the rights of the underclass; of prisoners, black people, women, minorities everywhere.

The concept is fantastic - what if in order to commute someone's sentence you had to join and thrive for three years of to-the-death televised gladiatorial combat - Complete with wrestling storylines, personalities, and the ability for the winners to earn "blood points" with which they can make things easier on themselves - weapons, food, rest... There are so many directions this could go, and so many of them fruitful with thematic layers, easy to disparage the intended target. Unfortunately he only somewhat succeeds.

The characters are uneven. We predominantly follow a singular "Chain", one of the squads of gladiators who are meant to work together and support each other (or backstab each other violently) - but though there are some 8 interesting characters to choose from here, we stick with 2, and only one of those is really fleshed out much. When we're not with the Chain, we go to a number of secondary PoVs - some, like the rival "Links" (Links in a Chain) are absolutely fantastic. Others, like those of the civilians outside the games are prominently weak, and I'm still not sure what they add to the story, when they're dropped out of the narrative without much fanfare.

If anything, I think the story is just too simple and gets in its own way - we go back and forth about the schedule and the rules and how chains interact, and all this minutiae, and it leads to this big reveal that we end on... but none of it aims much at the core of the grand concept. The author bring in footnotes every so often in order to make a point very clear - many of which are spine chilling ironies or statistics of our modern prison system... but they also read as a "....get it?" moment, like we couldn't have understood what was going on otherwise. I do think this aspect is integrated much better than, say, R. F. Kuang's Babel - but it goes along the same lines... Adjei-Brenyah is so worried we won't get the point of the novel he forgets to focus on it in the arc of the thing itself.

The main exception, and best aspect of the story is the rival group, headed by the "Scorpion Singer". His sections move away from the typical 3rd person narrative into a dialect heavy 1st person, which actually embeds us well into the man's experience in prison *before* the games... and these changes make all the difference. The prose is cleaner, the injustice is nastier, the twists more interesting... and.... well, I was disappointed how this bit ended, its conclusion pretty well sealing my feelings about the book. But until then, I was pleasantly surprised every time these sections appeared.

Chain-Gang All-Stars doesn't quite live up to the hype, but that isn't to say that there isn't a *lot* of greatness in here, and packaged along a fun read.

melodyriggs's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

5.0

This is a hard one to review. On the whole- the writing is amazing and the plot interesting- using prisoners in fight to the death matches as entertainment for America and a way for the prisoners to be freed early if they survive. Our prison system is f*cked up as it is and this messed with me a bit. I did like (if that’s even the right word) how the author footnoted facts about our current system of incarceration. Maybe it’s because I finished this and then had a Sunday School class in which someone who spent 27 years on death row and is awaiting a new trial due to evidence prosecutors withheld that has me still chewing on this one, which I’ll probably be doing for a while.