"The men and women who had presumably pay hundreds of dollars to witness this circus of death
first hand were, more or less, regular people"

Thank you NetGalley for my e-ARC of Chain- Gang All Stairs.

This book is set in the relatively near (unknown) future - where incarcerated prisoners fight to the death for televised entertainment, and for the chance to earn better conditions or in a best case scenario - their freedom if they win all their matches over the three years they participate in the program (referred to as "High Freed").

It introduces us to our main protagonists - Hurricane Staxx and Loretta Thurwar, who are both talented fighters on the same 'chain gang' who often fight together, however one of the novel's strengths is the multitude of POVs that it offers. The world-building is thorough and thought-provoking. Thurwar’s and Staxxx’s dilemma however was the most heart-wrecking - and it forces the reader to confront it head-on, unable to look away - like some kind of ominous & train-wreck.

There is more violence than you shake a scythe at, which is to be expected in a novel such as this. While it may be a dystopian future - it is horrifically rooted in reality.
The pacing started slower than I expected, however it picked up fairly quickly.
The prose is well-crafted.

It offers a scathing review of the for-profit prison system, systemic racism & entertainment.
Heavily recommend if you're looking for a serious read - there's no thrilling fun or pop-corn read to be had here.

4.75: rounded up to 5*

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a speculative dystopian novel set in a not too distant future where prisons are run fully for profit and prisoners can sign up for a deadly “hard action sport” that involves fighting each other to the death. Though of course, they don’t have much of a choice, as seen in the backstory of several characters.

The comparisons to The Hunger Games make sense, in that participants in Chain-Gang All-Stars are part of a brutal reality show with death as a constant companion. One of the most insidious aspects of it is how they are expected to join in on the spectacle, playing along with the manufactured drama.

Structurally, the book moves between a few different point of view characters and peppers in historical facts about racial inequality the justice system, police and prison brutality, and the enduring legacy of slavery and how it intersects with the events of the book. I found this effective as it really hammered home how the fiction being described is not so many steps away from current reality.

Why only four stars? This may be a flaw in me rather than the book but I found that I didn’t connect with the two main characters as well as I’d expected. The ending, while it did hit me, didn’t hit as hard as it could have because of that. Maybe I was holding a part of myself back from the characters to avoid the devastation that was clearly coming.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

I haven't read Friday Black so this book was my introduction to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah - and what an introduction it is!

Chain-Gang All-Stars is propulsive, gory, horrifying, but also weirdly hopeful. The satire here has real teeth, and bites into far more than the 13th amendment and the enslavement of incarcerated people. The notion of what gets forsaken in the name of entertainment, especially the all-access kind, is front and center too.

Welcome to the world of the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE) games, where incarcerated people attempt to win freedom by killing their opponents in death matches staged for the entertainment of streaming subscribers.

Hurricane Staxxx wields her scythe in the name of love, reaping souls to the status of low freed. Thurwar is her lover, her doubles partner, and the sole CAPE Grand Colossal who's just a few bouts away from high (actual) freedom. They're both "links" in the same prison franchise "chain", forced to march under an "anchor", contained by chips in their wrists, and threatened with an "influencer" (a device that activates all the pain receptor in a body, often breaking the victim's mind). It's grimly dystopian, and all the more so because it's all so possible.

Adjei-Brenyah has a true gift for writing action sequences and fight scenes, they are so well-described, so easy to picture, and so unflinching in their brutality that I had to put the book down a couple of times to just breathe. The characters, and there are many of them, are skillfully drawn and easily distinguishable. Each of them feels like a real person, which makes the violence and all the dying hit harder still.

I don't want to make this sound unrelentingly grim, because it isn't. There is humor here, deployed when it's most needed, often of the darkest sort. There is also hope. As broken as the "links" we meet are, they are still capable of generosity, of surprising kindness, and above all of love. They are people, after all, in all their messy complexities. And there are those, even in the world of the book, who can see that.

An amazing read actually. Took me a little while to get my bearings in terms of how some of the secondary POV characters become relevant to the story, but once that all clicked, I was just enthralled.
Nana blended close-third person and first person perspectives seamlessly, and found a way to include footnotes in fiction with all the flare and necessity of Babel by Kuang.
Let it be on record that I'm begging for a sequel, scrounging even.

I really wanted to love this book given the interesting outlook but it had some difficult flaws in pacing and character choices

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a sci-fi take on a near future world of incarceration. Any attempt to rehabilitate offenders has long gone – incarceration is about making profit from those with the misfortune to be in the criminal justice system.

The headline scenario is a modern day take on Roman gladiators. Prisoners with a death sentence or a long prison sentence can opt to take part in the program. Survive for three years and you are free, but face monthly battles to the death and the constant threat between bouts from your fellow chain gang members. Only one “Link” has ever made it through the three year shift.

Meanwhile, we get an insight into the futuristic prisons that are so bad that they make the gladiatorial life seem preferable. Interminable solitary confinement in darkness; silence enforced by implants that release electric shocks at the slightest sound; slave labour; and punishment at the whim of the guards using the Influencer - a super-taser that creates the greatest imaginable pain.

Most of the story focuses on Loretta Thurwar and thee Hurricane Staxxx (Hamara Stacker), two black women participating in the gladiator program. They represent the fact that black people are over-represented in the current US criminal justice system. They are also lovers. Their nemeses are a pair of men, Simon J Craft, a man with mental health challenges, and Hendrix Young, a black man who self-harmed to escape a torturous regime at an experimental prison. The four characters have quite distinct voices and personalities. Unlike many prison-based novels, there is no attempt to make the lead characters innocent. They are guilty (albeit with some mitigating factors), but they are nevertheless portrayed as people rather than crimes. They have feelings. The have names.

The story itself is as gripping as it is grotesque. Needless to say, there are no happy endings, but the tone often has a lightness that balances the darkness of the themes. And the themes are front and centre. At times, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah breaks the fourth wall by offering footnotes setting out the most shameful statistics and history of the current US penal system. These footnotes remind the reader that although the scenarios are futuristic, the characters represent the current reality – both within the criminal justice system, and also within the world of media and the small group of penal reformers. It is one big allegory.

The writing offers multiple narrators and multiple points of view in handily bite sized chapters. This maintains interest and succeeds in building a complex world for the story. It allows the reader multiple ways into the story as well as allowing multiple contemporary issues to be represented.

In his end notes, Adjei-Brenyah cites various academic and journalistic references. I suspect there is also an unacknowledged debt to other works of fiction, including the films Spartacus and Running Man – perhaps even elements of Tron. Chain-Gang All-Stars is original, but some of the ideas in it may feel familiar.

This is a really classy piece of writing – quite unexpected for a novel whose premise sounded pretty salacious and whose opening pages lived up to that salacious promise. Chain-Gang All-Stars is Colossal.

This is a wild adventure. We are catapulted into a world where prisoners/gladiators are idolised like pop stars, and yet they risk their lives day in day out. The strength of the female characters here are worth a mention. Worth a read - better than some netflix shows.

I really enjoyed this book, it wasn't what I was expecting but I love a bit of dystopia and the blurb had me hooked at the Hunger Games comparison.
It took me a little while to get into between all the names of the various chain gang members and names of their weapons and I thought there were some pacing issues where some sections just dragged. But I liked the characters Staxx & Thurwar & was rooting for them from the get go.
Gory, brutal & a bit frightening that something like this could be a possibility in the not to distant future.
This one will stay with me for a while, the ending though!
My thanks to Netgalley & the Publisher for my eARC in return for my honest review.

My first impression of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s second novel was Wow! What a first page!:

‘She noticed her own steadiness and felt a dim love for herself. Strange. She’d counted herself wretched for so long. But the crowd seemed to appreciate her boldness. They cheered. Thought their support was edged with brutal irony. They looked down on this Black woman, dressed in the gray jumpsuit of the incarcerated. She was tall and strong, and they looked down on her and the tight coils of black hair on her head. They looked down gleefully. She was about to die. They believed this the way they believed in the sun and moon and the air they breathed.’

But by 50%, I’d developed some uneasiness, wearied by the effacement of victims’ identities.

For instance, I was tired of, and almost angered by, the extensive attention given over to Simon J. Craft's first-person POV, imbued with such pathos, but Adjei-Brenyah never informs readers about the girl[s] or the woman/women whom he raped. His party-of-two ‘chain gang’ was devoid of interest for me and it seemed wholly perfunctory, contrived only in order to elicit emotional engagement with Staxxx and Thurwar’s final doubles match against the pair (it backfired with me because I just didn’t care what happened to the male duo, so this climactic battle held no interest).

I couldn’t reconcile the author’s choice to delve into specific characters’ storylines whom I considered ultimately nondescript, rather than engaging with the lives of those victims of the prisoners' crimes. From quite early on, I was unsettled by the fact that readers are given the barest exposition of each competitor’s crime. The novel begged interrogation of its author’s motives too much and too early, in my view:

‘There were two ways to think about it. You could believe there were good people and bad people. And that the good deserved glory and the bad deserved punishment. Or, you could believe that no one deserved to be punished, but that the punishment was a necessary fallout. An unavoidable sacrifice to serve the greatest good: humanity. And so they, the GameMasters, shouldered the burden as well. Always for the ultimate good. The difficult good. The goddamned world of good that was only possible because they were willing to build the infrastructure to facilitate the salvation. Remove a cancer. A justice effort performed for the people by the best of them. An effort to incapacitate an ever-present evil, to perform the retribution necessary to honour the many victims of the world’s great pain, to deter the seeds of evil growing in the masses and rehabilitate, when possible, those who sought redemption. Those who believed they deserved it. This is the world. This is the fact. A service as necessary as life itself. And they, we, you, them – everyone agreed to the agreement.’

I didn't know who I was supposed to be rooting for. There were too many viewpoints, scattering my attention across Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s world. This was a great way to see the dystopian universe he has constructed, and its laws, but disadvantageous in terms of effecting sympathy. Swapping between many voices diluted the plot, as did the disconnect between first-person point of view and second person point of view. The multitude of viewpoints deprived the novel of cohesion, fragmenting the cast of characters.

Furthermore, I found the characters to be purely functional, rather than expressive or engrossing; lacking that inner life that great fictional characters manifest. It happened often that I guessed the purpose that a certain character stood to fulfil in the text as they were introduced, and then – bam! So many chapters later, they succumbed to that very purpose in the plot. Having read in the blurb that Season 33 of the games would see Staxxx and Thurwar battling each other, the characters were only ever moving towards that single predictable outcome; the resolution in the last sentences of the book had been evident all the way through.

I felt resistance whilst reading, trying to balance the dystopian fantasy with the real-world statistics, particularly in the long build-up of the novel, prior to Part III. In Part III, it would appear that Adjei-Brenyah is using the fiction here as the carrier for the footnotes, and the real-world, non-fiction statistics are the real message. I felt my focus being guided to the stream of information provided by the footnotes and I wondered whether I had to get to full saturation in the Chain-Gang universe, at this late point in the novel, before I could look away from the colourfully wild and attention-grabbing violence, to see and experience the dichotomy that the author intended. Is this the Chain-Gang All-Stars message:

‘Eighty-six percent of women in jail have experienced sexual violence. A staggering reality. Most women in jail have experienced sexual violence.’

‘About 14,700 complaints alleging sexual and physical abuse were lodged against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) between 2010 and 2016. Thousands and thousands. ICE was created in 2003 as part of the government’s response to the September 11 attacks.’

‘Suicide is the leading cause of preventable death among prisoners. From 2001 to 2019 suicide exploded in prisons. In that span of time the number of suicides increased 85 percent in state prisons, 61 in federal prisons, and 13 percent in local jails.’

‘It is estimated that between 2.3 percent and 5 percent of incarcerated people in America are innocent. That number represents potentially over 100,000 people.’

Ultimately, my biggest issue with the text is that, a week after finishing ‘Chain-Gang All-Stars’, I’m still asking myself whether race, gender, and sexuality are handled sensitively as Adjei-Brenyah moves them under the spotlight. Is it done fairly and with level-headedness? Does it speak of passion and commitment? Yet, I still have reservations about the main characters and the presentation of women, and the presentation of women in a same-sex relationship. They are women, as am I. They are women who love women, as am I. Yet this squirming feeling persists, which I was unable to supress all throughout reading, that they are tokenised LGBTQ women.

My thanks to Random House UK, Vintage, for an eARC in exchange for review.

Unfortunatly this one did not work for me. I seen the hype and others reviews and im so glad they all enjoyed but i just couldnt connect with this story. Dnf at 60 ish % but i skipped through a fair too in places.

The first chapter was so promising it really pulled me in. A kind of death race/gladiator/running man mix and i was excited to see what would happen!
My issue was that i didnt feel much for the characters. The two leading ladys were interesting and it had its parts where i enjoyed. I felt there was too much back story. It went on a bit longer than needed i felt. It could have been maybe 100pages shorter for me.

Idea behind this was great. Death scenes and explanation in the chapter was faultless. The rest i felt could have been "executed" better to match up to that. I will however read Friday Black to compaire.

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for this eCopy to review

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a very violent dystopian story and was too gory for my liking. It is about the American Penal system running a reality show where death row inmates are given the chance to earn their freedom by participating in the show where they fight each other to the death like the Roman gladiator games.

Just when you think it is getting unbelievable Adjei-Brenyah incorporates real statistics from the American penal system which shows that this state of affairs could all too soon become reality. A thought provoking read about what humanity means.

In a near future the American penal system is monetizing inmates as entertainment in gladiatorial death matches in tv. The book follows a number of characters who are hoping to find freedom - be that real or metaphorical - via the inhumane system. Whilst the narrative doesn't always hit the mark the story and characters draw you in from the start and keep you with them throughout. (Copy received via Netgalley in return for an honest review).

Whoah! What's just hit me?! That's pretty much the feeling I was left with when I finished reading Chain-Gang All-Stars. Finishing it pretty much in one whole weekend. I. just. couldn't. put. it. down.

Can you imagine "going from murderer to number seven on the "America's Hottest Men" list? - Well, welcome to Chain-Gang All Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah brutal dystopian world. "Prison isn't sexy or cool, but Chain-Gang is both". Chain-Gang, or the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment program (CAPE), is the fastest-growing program in the world. It is compelling, easy-watching, and the most visceral viewing experience ever conceived. Chain Gang All Stars has been going for 32 seasons!

This is not your ordinary wrestling show but a hyper-athletic hard action sports entertainment platform where you play for your life (literally). The competitors, or "links", are sourced from the incarceration system; they have all been given the death penalty. As a link, you are assigned a numeric economic value. This value is quantified in points, "Blood Points" (wink), which are earned through successful participation in the program. Blood Points allow links to purchase goods such as food, weapons, certain levels of medical care, armour, and clothes, among other amenities. Outside sponsors, like any other major sports, may also support a link’s participation.

We cant help getting hooked, and want to see the links winning; we want them to achieve “High Freedom” and become “freed members of society”. The CAPE program is like an extension of a prisoner's murder sentence and in no way grants them clemency for their crimes. However, through participation in the CAPE program, they may earn exoneration and be released into public life. Although they'd have to successfully participate in the CAPE program for a period of three years, surviving each Battleground. You might think that is impossible, however some have done it before. And Loretta Thurwar, the current Grand Colossal, is only weeks away into earning “High Freedom”. Can she do it? Will the organisers of CAPE allow her to do it? The stakes are high. How will the other links in her chain be affected? - Thurwar is the greatest anti-hero.

#ChainGangAllStars is impeccably researched and written with such mastery that you cannot help but completely immerse yourself in the lives of these "star" links, and start rooting for one of them, be it Thurwar or Hurricane Staxxx, or one of the others. Adjei-Brenyah develops complex, humane characters, accompanied by an environment that made us rethink our ideas about our present incarceration systems.

It is not totally one-sided: The Coalition to End Neo-Slavery, or journalists like Trace Lasser, are demonstrating against hard action-sports and fighting to end the death penalty, they remind us that we must fight for a more humane society,

Yes, glorifying a violent sport that involves inmates with death sentences is obviously unethical and goes against the principles of human rights and dignity. But this is is where Adjei-Brenyah hits gold. He successfully plays with those concepts.

We learn that "Trans Americans are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated as cisgender Americans. More than twice. And trans people of colour are more likely to be incarcerated than white trans people. The vulnerable are targeted, again, always." Also, "It is estimated that between 2.3 percent and 5 percent of incarcerated people in America are innocent. That number represents potentially over 100,000 people." And yet, we cannot stop watching Chain-Gang All Stars, even us readers get involved in a way that we become complicit with the system.

“They were just people, and people were all the same. “Everybody just wants to be happy.” This she’d heard from a brilliant woman she’d shared a cell with when she was in prison. Everybody was looking for the same thing in a lot of different ways.”

Adjei-Brenyah gives each character so much depth that we can't help but embrace their complex humanity and, in a way, forgive them for their crimes while hoping that they get a second chance.

I had a fantastic ride reading Chain-Gang All Stars. It is pure dystopian virtuosity!

Bravo, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah!

I am very grateful to #Netgalley and Penguin Vintage Books for the advanced review copy.

I love a bit of dystopia, even when it’s terrifyingly believable: and this is one of those stories. Given the horrors of the prison system today, this book seems far too plausible. It’s not an easy read, but deffo an important one! And it does keep you hooked!

If you need to scratch your Squid Game itch with some gritty, tense and amazing writing, this is the book for you! Highly enjoyed reading this

I came VERY close to not finishing this book.

It wasn't the horrific killing that got me. It was the long, dull, marches, the extensive chats between chain members around the camp fire, and just an awful lot of confusing names - not only the prisoners, but their individual weapons of choice.

I dragged myself through, feeling it would be disrespectful to the power of the concept to quit and eventually - at about 2/3 of the way through, I 'got' it. Which either makes me a particularly slow learner or far too easily distracted.

The concept is frighteningly believable. After all, there's no shortage of murderers locked up in prison and no shortage of members of the public who'd happy see them set up to fight each other to the death in a frenzy of Hunger Games meets Gladiator.

What stops this just being another near-future violent dystopia is the injection of real world American prison and justice statistics. Every time you think "Well that's going a bit too far!", up pops a footnote to remind us that things are already pretty darned dystopian in the US correctional system.

I'm not entirely sure I understood the ending. I'm not entirely sure I needed to. This book is a journey, not a destination.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for my copy.

Chain-Gang All-Stars, penned by the brilliant Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, is a literary gem that immerses readers in a brutal world of penal entertainment. This thought-provoking novel delves deep into the moral complexities of the prison system, challenging our perceptions of humanity, justice, and the blurred lines between entertainment and cruelty.

Adjei-Brenyah skillfully weaves a tale of two extraordinary women, Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker, who find themselves trapped within the depravity of America's private prison industry. As stars of the highly-controversial CAPE (Criminal Action Penal Entertainment), they fight for their freedom, becoming symbols of hope in a system stained by racism and unchecked capitalism.

Through vivid storytelling, the author confronts the reader with uncomfortable truths about the twisted logic that allows society to cheer for convicted murderers to kill again. The book poses profound questions about the morality of a system that thrives on the suffering and death of its prisoners, challenging us to examine our own complicity.

Author's masterful prose not only captures the brutality of the gladiator-style battles within CAPE but also explores the fragile humanity that exists within the prisoners themselves. He delves into the depths of forgiveness, highlighting the moral relativity that emerges when confronted with individuals whose actions are applauded despite contradicting societal norms.

'Chain-Gang All-Stars' is a searing indictment of systemic racism, unfettered capitalism, and the oppressive mass incarceration plaguing America. The author's keen observations and unflinching portrayal of this unholy alliance demand our attention and force us to reevaluate our notions of justice and freedom.

In conclusion, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's 'Chain-Gang All-Stars' is a tour de force that leaves an indelible mark on its readers. Its rawness and brutality are counterbalanced by its thought-provoking intricacies, ensuring an emotional and intellectual journey that will resonate long after the final page. This book is an essential read for anyone seeking a profound exploration of morality, empathy, and the complexities of our justice systems.

When I saw the plot for Chain-Gang All Stars, I was immediately invested. Post apocalyptic-style dystopia? Sign me up.

So, thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

However, the novel itself left me feeling more than a little disappointed. The concept, a stunning indictment of the US justice system and the inherent inequity that exists within, is clever and nuanced, with heavy hitting themes that would make the less-knowledgeable of the injustice reel.
But the execution left a lot to be desired.

There are so many perspectives throughout the book that it’s hard to follow each individual thread, and in giving so many characters in so many writing styles (both a mix of vernaculars and a mix of first- and third-person), it felt as though I never truly connected with any of them. Thurwar and Staxxx are clearly the poster characters, but there’s a distinct lack of character building that even they feel 2-dimensional.
As for the rest of the characters, I couldn’t tell you all their names, nor could I say the expected empathy in their deaths had any impact. Perhaps this is intentional, to remind the reader that the system wants to force you to disassociate from those persecuted, but if this is the case it didn’t work for me.

Ultimately the book felt like a LONG read - I forced myself through it and my overall sentiment was “ehh..”. And that’s a real shame, because its concept and the reflective mirror it holds up to society is NEEDED, but the novel itself is distinctly mid for me.

Thank you Random House UK, Vintage, Harvill Secker and Netgalley for the arc of Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in exchange for my honest and unbiased review.

Chain Hang All-Stars is described as “Squid Game meets The Handmaid's Tale in THE new dystopian novel of summer 2023” and I cannot deny this. However, I would be loathe to describe it as either literary fiction or the horror of television fiction, this is something more, and you will either love it or hate it.

I won’t deny that is book is extremely violent, it goes to all the levels of violence and more but, what is more brutal and shocking is how near to truth this near-future dystopian story is to reality. Set in a world where prisoners are pitted against each other in gladiator/slave style battles to the death, viewed and consumed by millions as televised and streamed hard action sports with all the power, money and profit that comes from these events.

Prisoners can elect to join ‘chain gangs’ in lieu of serving their sentences, fighting Blood sport battles to the death, punctuated by marches and interim melees for the entertainment of the masses. Think Big Brother crossed with Gladiators style reality television, owned and profited from by CAPE (Criminal Action Penal Entertainment.) for the prisoners a chance to escape prison within 3 years, if they survive for CAPE profit, and reducing their ever growing prison problem.

This is not a story told at epic battle level but, more from the POVs of the cast of prisoners who find themselves in the centre of both Gladiator ring and public eye. The cast is wide ranging and large, it’s easy to lose track of your focus isn’t full but, certain characters and relationships come to the fore. In particular Hurricane Staxxx and Loretta Thurwar, 2 exceedingly strong and powerful women whose rise up the chain and relationship are a real focus point.

Another key focus for this story is the increase of public protest against this Blood sport and the slavery of prisoners, with increasing demand that this ‘sport’ should be ended. It’s also interesting to see from the perspective of a viewer, and the journey told within the book. I’m not going to spoil this.

This isn’t your traditional dystopian novel that provides a clear foundation for the story, travelling through adventure and achievement to a traditional peppy ending. This is a book that has a clear message and, truthfully it will be a polarising book with a multitude of triggers for many but, it’s a book that once picked up is very difficult to walk away from.

This detailed story has many narrative threads woven through, with several characters who finally come together. It's a hard but necessary read: suffering in jail is much more common that we think, and takes many forms!

I love the characters as much as I hate the world they're thrown in - harsh and cruel. And much too close to home to feel comfortable. We need to be unsettled, and it is time for a change.