Reviews with content warning for Racism - Chain-Gang All-Stars

Reviews tagging 'Racism'

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

332 reviews

jbenz1213's review against another edition

dark hopeful inspiring sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

If you know anything about Chain-Gang All-Stars, you’ve probably heard the recurring byline “The Hunger Games but about the prison industrial complex.” And, y’know, it is that. But it’s a much more complicated work than The Hunger Games, one that seems to understand its role as entertainment while also trying to sneak a righteous political ideology under its readers’ door. It does a lot right, but it still has some trouble resolving that uncomfortable tension between being a genre novel and persuasive social commentary.

The plot follows Loretta Thurwar, an incarcerated woman who has been selected to participate in a Gladiator-like (or Hunger Games-like, or Battle Royale-like, etc.) competition where convicted felons fight each other to the death. It’s not hard to predict where this is going—the parallels between this program—called Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, or CAPE, in Chain-Gang’s near-future world—and the real life industries supported by prison labor are pretty clear. The prison industry itself is always eager to make a quick buck off the people they’ve imprisoned, many wrongly, and the incarcerated have already been so thoroughly othered in American society that the suits can get away with it. Why wouldn’t extreme “sports” or pitch-black reality TV be next?

For people who are not as familiar with these topics (and I do think the uninformed are Adjei-Brenyah’s target audience), I can imagine these parallels being pretty shocking. In one of Chain-Gang’s most “fun” (if anything in this book can be described that way) twists, its footnotes shift between describing technological advances unique to this fictional world and real life legislation that has enabled the exploitation of the prison population. The uninitiated might be surprised that much of the machinery that enables the CAPE program is already in place in our world. The social commentary here is fury-filled and the prose delivering it is striking and memorable.

Thurwar has been fighting in CAPE for the last three years, and is about to win her freedom when the events of the novel pick up. Many battle royale tropes are present here, modified with an anti-capitalist sheen. Each fighter has a stage name, a unique weapon, and fictional corporate sponsors that are legally distinct from their real world counterparts (Home Depot and Whole Foods catch a few targeted jabs here). We follow Thurwar and her Chain—the team-like group of fighters that she travels with—over the course of her final three fights.

This is where the tension arises. Are the pulse pounding highlights of these books not bloody fights to the death? If the point of Chain-Gang is to decry the monetization of incarcerated peoples’ pain and suffering, why are we presenting it as a form of entertainment in this trope-filled sci-fi novel?

To his credit, Adjei-Brenyah clearly understands this dynamic, and tries to address it in multiple ways to different degrees of success. In one particularly ineffective instance, he calls our attention to a footnote during a particularly horrifying torture scene only to scold us—“Don’t look down. Help me. Please. Help me.” My brother in Christ, you are the one who wrote this footnote!!

In contrast stands a subplot about a couple made up of a guy who is a full-throated fan of CAPE, and his girlfriend, who begins as a skeptic. Over the course of a few chapters, the girlfriend becomes enamored by the drama surrounding the fighters, and is moved by their deaths. It’s horrible, but she can’t look away—it’s compelling, after all! She feels an attachment to some of the Links, and starts to hold grudges against those who kill her favorites in battle. But is the “villain” who killed your favorite warrior really the bad guy? Do you really want them to die in their next match? Sometimes, the commoditization of suffering can actually perpetuate it.

Of course, Chain-Gang is making the argument that the men in board rooms organizing the games are the true source of evil in its world, just like the men in board rooms discussing new opportunities in prison labor are in ours. But it does draw an uncomfortable parallel—isn’t Chain-Gang All-Stars a form of entertainment? Are we not consuming the suffering of these fictional characters when we read this book? How many will read this, set it aside, and then do absolutely nothing to challenge the status quo?

Adjei-Brenyah tries to thread this needle by avoiding gratuitous descriptions of violence when possible, and by emphasizing the brutality and horrific consequences of violence when it does come to pass. Largely, he’s produced what he set out to—a Trojan horse of a novel for suburbanites who may have never thought about the militarization of police, or the consequences of solitary confinement, or the death penalty. The thematic core of the novel is radical love—for yourself, and for others, even those who have committed horrible, violent crimes. But the fact remains that the climax of this story is a pair of brutal head-to-head fights written like action sequences, and I’m having a hard time resolving those threads.

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thegillbird's review against another edition

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dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

I think the author tried to do a bit too much with the narrative of this book- too many characters, too many storylines, and too much jumping around. I very much enjoyed the book, but would have liked the story to be edited down more.

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caro_reynolds's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

This is a book I won’t forget for a long time. The dystopian world the author builds in which prison inmates battle to the death feels equally insane and scarily possible. The short chapters with different character perspectives reveal so much about the greater world and how deeply rooted the penal system is tied to capitalism. Even if you are iffy on dystopian almost sci-fi stories, this should be required reading.

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maddisaysmeow's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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emfass's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I'm reviewing this months after the fact and I still don't know how to talk about this book. I was gutted and stunned and so affected by this writing and these characters and the world that Adjei-Brenyah created, which feels like it could be just a few months away. Brilliantly presenting ideas of abolition and social justice through a narrative, fictional story. I was blown away.

It took me a while to drop in to the kaleidoscope format of storytelling, but I looooooved it. How does this world affect all these different people who have different relationships to the Chain Gang All-Stars machine.

The narrators did a phenomenal job: Shayna Small (main narrator), Aaron Goodson (Hendrix Young), Michael Crouch (Simon J. Craft), Lee Osorio (Gunny Puddles)

This is on my list of best books I've ever read.

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lokes's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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gardner98's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective sad tense

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

This book is similar hunger games, as this centers a game where criminals are forced to fight to the death for their freedom. The book is a social commentary on mass incarceration and the prison industrial conflict.
TW: A lot of violence.

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