Reviews with content warning for Domestic abuse - Chain-Gang All-Stars

One of my fav books I’ve read this past couple of years. features a sapphic couple with a poly character, as well as a minor trans/nb character. a really sharp witted satire with dark and insightful commentary on the prison industrial system.

Content Warnings

3mmers's review against another edition

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challenging emotional tense fast-paced

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

5.0

Ever since I finished Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, I have dedicated myself body and soul to my new calling: shilling this book to anyone who will listen. You should read this book. If you only read one book this year, let it be this one. If it doesn’t top my best list it’ll be a goddamned miracle. Required reading. Book of the year. The whole hog.

I’m saying this now because no complaint (and I have been able to find things to complain about) would make this less than a perfect 5/5 stars. The fact that I don’t see this everywhere on bookblr is an actual crime (and if I really wanted to make enemies I would share what type of crime I think it is).

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a lot of things. It was first described to me as ‘The Shawshank Redemption meets Fight Club' and it is so much more than that. There is a lot more Gladiator here than Fight Club, but also more NFL, professional wrestling, and, hell, ‘Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ or Red Table Talks.

Chain-Gang All-Stars is also maybe the best political fiction novel of the 21st century. This book is a nuanced argument for prison abolition informed by The New Jim Crow. This book is a character drama. This book is a sapphic romance novel. This book will change your life. The hype is real.

Chain-Gang All-Stars brings us to a near future sci-fi dystopia where America’s new favourite past time is gladiatorial death matches euphemized as ‘hard action sports’. Inmates convicted of the ‘worst’ crimes, especially murder or rape, are given the ‘choice’ to participate in the Chain-Gang All-Stars league and win their freedom by surviving three years of competition. Our protagonist is Loretta Thurwar, the league’s most popular and most dominant combatant, as she takes the title of High Colossal (the longest surviving combatant and therefore the closest to freedom) from her friend and team mate Sunset Harkness, after his mysterious death. Reeling from the loss of Sunset, Loretta is staring down her own freedom and the nagging fear that she’s only gotten closer to it by killing people. What is Blood Mama Loretta Thurwar when she isn’t in the All-Stars? The other major complication is Loretta’s girlfriend Hamara ‘Thee Hurricane STAXX’ Stacker, ebuillent and exuberant where Loretta is reserved, and the league’s hottest rising star.

Loretta has received a tip that for her final fight she will be matched up with none other than STAXX. There is no choice between freedom and death.

God what a premise.

Chain-Gang All-Stars nails its social commentary so accurately that it feels like it could take place tomorrow. A prison fight league is a shocking, but nothing in the book feels far fetched. We already treat prison inmates as disposable reservoirs of cheap labour. We already treat Black athletes (and other celebrities) as largely disposable entertainment. This book combines the attitude of white football fans screaming that Colin Kaepernick is paid to play football not to have thoughts and opinions, with a prison industrial complex that pulls millions of primarily Black people into modern day slavery, labour that we are more than happy to enjoy the products of. Adjei-Brenyah’s literary calling card is his use of ultraviolence to force the reader to confront the violence present but invisibilized in our own society, and this novel is a masterclass in the technique. It forces us to confront unflattering realities through exaggeration and does it with so much style we, the readers, are enraptured.

Towards the middle of the book

we meet the masterminds of the All-Stars and they’re bad in all the usual ways: a bunch of suits in a boardroom optimizing an entertainment property that they have no real connection to. What struck me about this scene is that they have one of the best lines of the whole novel. “The knife is only so far from your neck.” This slogan so efficiently informs how and why the league’s architects created it, and why people are invested in watching it. And you wouldn’t even have to scroll for more than a minute to find this exact same shit on TikTok.

Chain-Gang All-Stars understands just how carceral we are and viciously reflects that back outwards in the destruction of Black bodies for entertainment.

I found myself often thinking about how great it would be as a TV show. It would whip ass. A part of me hopes that Netflix is cutting Adjei-Brenyah and fat cheque as we speak (and casting Danai Gurira as Loretta), but that’s the instinct that thought a Squid Game reality show would be a good idea and not entirely contrary to the point of the original story. One motif throughout CGAS is

how even pacifist viewers are drawn into the Hard Action league due to our inescapable romance with violence, and this sensation is paralleled on a meta-narrative level as the reader is entranced by the action scenes.

It underscores, for me, our complicity in at best tolerating the systematic violence of our white supremacist society.

For me the heart of this book is something I never expected. Chain-Gang All-Stars is one of my top three favourite romances ever. I’ve always had a hard time articulating why I like things, and romances most of all, so bear with me.

The characters are overall great. Loretta is a strong leader and a powerful fighter, known for her dominance both on the battle ground and within her team. This comes with a hidden profound weakness. She is exhausted by the performance demanded by her reputation and after three years a knee injury is catching up with her. Internally she is self-reflective and uncertain. Can she be the leader the chain needs? How can she protect Hamara from her knowledge of the future? Does she deserve the power and love she has gained from the All-Stars? Hamara is open and talkative — Loretta maintains her humanity on the battleground by refusing to engage, but Hamara buys into the performance of the league, asserting her humanity through long emotional speeches — but her internal self is just as mysterious as the taciturn Thurwar’s. (Note how Adjei-Brenyah seamlessly weaves well-rounded character with political commentary).

The romance arc shows us a new side of the characters, something that is ambiguously accessible to fans of the All-Stars. Almost all of their lives are surveilled by fans, the relationship is something visible to their audience, but fundamentally personal and inaccessible to them.

Simultaneously, the romance arc shows the way the characters grapple with lovability (whether they can be loved). Loretta was imprisoned for intimate partner violence, abusing and eventually killing her girlfriend, and wonders if she is a changed enough person to be in a relationship with Hamara.

That question of what a death contest means for the ostensible rehabilitation of felons rests in the background of the entire book (the commentary is obvious; our prison system is extremely punitive for much more time even than an individual’s sentence, which is in tension with its ostensibly rehabilliatory goals. The romance arc exposes a new side of the characters. In their interactions with other lynks Loretta and Hamara are at once characters for the consumption of the All-Stars audience, and more human, interacting with the only others who share a basis of experience with them. Together, Loretta and Hamara can encounter each other on a personal level. I loved the way their relationship defies the genre expectations of their audience;

Hamara is polyamorous and has a relationship with another member of the chain, but while the audience expects this to create tension, Loretta and Randy Mac (Hamara’s second lover) tolerate each other. They’re even allies within the dynamic of the chain

. I love that the romance arc is used to explore the characters’ humanity and their doubts, rather than feeling super obligatory. Plus, the way in which the romance arc is used to reclaim a sense of humanity is incredibly moving, especially during the book’s climax.

I also want to get into my few criticisms of the book. I mentioned that the scifi worldbuilding of Chain-Gang All-Stars is really great in the way it underlines how this sci-fi future has grown directly out of our dystopian present. The ways in which the All-Stars resemble our current American football, boxing, and wrestling leagues is unsubtle and overbearing and that works super well for the overall messaging. What worked less well for me was the informational footnotes. Chain-Gang All-Stars has two kinds of footnotes; narrative ones that appear when a character is killed (I really like these, they very effectively humanize minor characters and underlines the tension between the individuality of each person and the dehumanization of being the entertainment), and informational footnotes that explicitly connect the fictional details to their real world inspiration.

I quickly soured on the informational footnotes. I don’t feel like I need a reminder that a near-future dystopia is commenting on present conditions; that’s already the premise. I empathize with the intention to make sure the audience understands that some things that we might hope were made up are actually the unfortunate reality for millions of inmates, but my experience was it took an extremely obvious subtext and made it too explicit. It felt a bit too preachy, like, we done know. For example,

Hamara’s backstory is that she was imprisoned for the self-defence killing of a man who was trying to sexually assault her when she was a teenager. This is based on the real life conviction of Cyntoia Brown, who was sixteen when she killed a man who had sex trafficked her in an attempt to escape, for which she was given a life sentence. It’s a very relevant thing to reference in a book like this, but I already knew who Cyntoia Brown was

. I got the reference well before this footnote. I already knew people die from being tazed. I picked this book up because I had already read The New Jim Crow.

Ultimately this is a nitpick because Chain-Gang All-Stars already does its subtext so well. I think if it had been further towards The Hunger Games end of the dystopia spectrum I wouldn’t have been so bothered, but the messaging was so effective that explicit connections felt too obvious. It’s too much of a good thing.

CGAS’ ability to balance addressing a lot of different social issues is genuinely impressive. I complain a lot about message books taking on too much, but CGAS is able to be both broad and deep.

My other reservation was also about the messaging. The tension between the fear the audience has of the combatants and of inmates generally, and the humanity of those inmates. The All Stars League takes people convicted of violence and murder and forces them into the endless pursuit of it.

The violence of the system is the explicit goal of the game masters. ‘The knife is only so far from your neck’; the self-justifying fear. Loretta agonizes over whether she is a changed person when her journey to High Freed involves nothing but the same behaviour that put her in jail in the first place. She feels intense guilt, but how can she call the All Stars repentance? There’s Bad Water, another lynk on Loretta’s chain who was innocent of the murder he was convicted of when he joined the All Stars, but was a murderer afterwards.

All Stars creates the violence it fears and justifies that violence with its fear. Adjei-Brenyah interrogates this fear through a sub-plot following the actions of a group of activists protesting the All Star League. Their young figurehead is Marissa, the daughter of the legendary Sunset Harkness.

Though he dies before the novel starts, Harkness haunts the narrative. His legendary career and chain mate with Loretta are a huge part of the League’s kayfabe storyline. More intimately, Harkness’ leadership emphasizing understanding and cooperation are a life-changing influence on the chain. Loretta (and Harkness himself) credit him with reclaiming the humanity of the chain. Despite a genuine (Obama-esque) talent for moving speeches, what Harkness never shares with either the chain or the All Stars audience us the same insecurity as Loretta, that despite his upcoming freedom he will continue to be a danger to his family outside.

It’s a fear that Marissa shares. Despite her activism that the All Stars are a cruel and shameful abuse of inmates, she cannot totally overcome the fear that drivers the league. She is secretly grateful that she will never have to directly encounter Harkness, even though, on principle, it is a reunion she supports.

This is a hugely compelling tension. The fear is the most obvious philosophical question facing prison abolition and defund the police. It’s the first question anyone asks. ‘If we abolish prison, what will we do with the truly unredeemable?’ ‘If we defund the police, who will answer 911 calls?’ Now, we can and should deconstruct how much of these questions woul d be realistically relevant in a post-carceral world. Prison abolition as a platform involves overhauling the social supports that leave people and communities at the mercy of the carceral system. We already have many potential alternatives to police for responding to emergency situations, and alternatives to prison that are much more effective at addressing anti-social behaviour. But at the same time that fear is an extremely palpable emotion that none of these alternatives truly addresses. It shows in the way discourse develops into nitpicking more extreme situations. ‘What abut serial killers or pedophiles or rapists or psychopaths?’ In other words, ‘I am still afraid, and the prison system is security theatre that makes me feel safe.’ Adjei-Brenyah brings this up directly; a reporter confronts Marissa and the activists asking what they would say to the fact her mother was murdered. Disappointingly, this was one of the few philosophical discussions that isn’t directly resolved. Chain-Gang All-Stars doesn’t have an answer. I get that. This is a hard question and I don’t think anyone does. What bothered me about it was that the problem is just kind of dropped. I really wish the novel had done more to bring it to a resolution, even an ambiguous one. As it is, it really sticks out as the only message that didn’t get as much exploration as it needed.

Both of these problems bothered me while I was reading, but in retrospect I can’t be quite so hard on them. They’re both good ideas that stand out mostly because the rest of the book is so well rounded in its messaging. Even with these limitations I’d give it have out of five anyway. You should read this. You must read this. This book will change your life.

Content Warnings

gogglor's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark

Diverse cast of characters? Yes

4.25

This is the only death-match universe type of book I’ve read that felt feasible and viscerally real. This book is Hunger Games meets Bitch Planet meets The New Jim Crow, and it will leave you thinking hard about the American carceral system and the death penalty.

Content Warnings