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

This is a masterful examination of American incarceration through an abolitionist lens.
The footnotes were unexpected and a beautiful and heartbreaking way to weave reality into this story.

Content Warnings

reaperreads's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative reflective tense fast-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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fatimaelf's review

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challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense medium-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

5.0

You know those books you read where you get a little bit in and know it’s gonna be a great book? Sometimes the books live up to that potential, and continue to blow you away. And sometimes, somehow, something goes wrong and the promise is left unfulfilled.

This book lived up to that potential.

And — respectfully — it kind of ruined my life. In a way that I will recommend to any person that asks, because I think it was so good and so important to read. To be completely honest, it wasn’t a book I necessarily wanted to pick back up to read again, or one that I wanted to continue reading, because of how distressing and sad it was, but it was a book I couldn’t stop thinking about the entire time I was reading it. And I mean that in the best way.

This novel was written in a series of vignettes, a collection of short stories interwoven onto the backdrop of a larger plot. Chain-Gang All-Stars is a live “extreme” sporting event comprising of individuals convicted of at least 25 years in prison fighting to the death in the hopes of winning their freedom. Across the course of the novel we follow the incarcerated who participate in the games, the fans who consume the games, the activists who oppose the games, and the men who built and maintain the games. So we gain snippets of insight into the people surrounding the games — maybe not the whole, unfiltered truth of them, as we would if we followed only one or two people, but we largely are able to follow their stories and understand their motivations.

Unquestionably the story is centered around Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, however, two Links (incarcerated members of the Chain-Gang) who have reached the top statuses of the games, Colossal. We understand these two by far the best: why they’re in prison, why they fight, why they do the things they do. And we grow to care for them and appreciate them as people. The other characters in the book are parts of their story, and we get to know them as part of Thurwar and Staxxx’s stories, but I think Adjei-Brenyah was masterful in what information he told us of the others and how he humanized them all, even if through a handful of pages or one or two chapters.

This book is one that makes you really question the world you live in, and how the world can and should change. It forces you to consider the line between criminal and civilian, between those who do wrong and are punished and those who do wrong and are not punished. What kind of wrongs must we do, to justify violence against us? What kind of violence must be done to us, until we are considered victims? But it inspires these questions through the engaging, at times devastating plot, where we follow these characters through the most obscene of entertainment. To what extent would we allow that kind of injustice? What kind of injustices are we currently allowing now, that we might never have thought we would? Part of the paradox of this book was that the games were presented as entertainment in that world, and we, too, as readers were reading this book about murderous entertainment…for entertainment.

The way this book was written was incredible, truly. Adjei-Brenyah has some genuine mic drop lines, and the worlds flowed on the page in such a way that it felt like you were reading much more than what you were seeing: so much meaning packed into one or two lines. The way Adjei-Brenyah inspired emotion was admirable as well, because he was so skilled at humanizing people that are regularly dehumanized, that you couldn’t help but empathize. The chapter where Craft is repeatedly tortured by a CO genuinely made me nauseous. And the Links we’ve come to know, even just a little, through snippets or interactions — when they die, it is a tragedy. No matter what they’ve done. It was a throwaway line, and still it gutted me when one of the A-Hamm died. Still it gutted me when, in the end, we watched a fight, and it went one way, but no matter which way went, I would likely have cried. And the ending — part of you hopes, throughout the whole book, that somehow someway our protagonists will figure out a way to make this book not a tragedy. And when it ends up a tragedy, it’s devastating. But I cannot say it wasn’t earned, and I cannot say it wasn’t how it should have ended.

I cannot say enough about how abhorrent the games are — imagine the level of fervor you’d find from a wrestling fan for their favorite wrestler, and then apply that to gladiator-style death matches. Adjei-Brenyah took the concept of Battle Royale or The Hunger Games, but rather than make the victims children, he made the victims convicted criminals. What makes this so poignant is that most people would agree that anyone who makes children fight to the death must be evil, must be the “bad guy.” But we’ve spent so long dehumanizing and degrading the incarcerated that you understand how something like could come to be. There’s such a distinct “us versus them” mentality when it comes to criminality, such a distinct overconfidence when it comes to how we view ourselves in relation to the law, that to see repeated examples of so-called “ordinary” citizens reacting in the same way as the so-called “criminals” is jarring.

There’s a psychology term that has always stuck with me, even though I’ve only ever taken psychology once and it was ten years ago now. The fundamental attribution error. It states that, when we ourselves do something, we attribute that action, that choice, to our environment; but when someone else does the same thing, we attribute what they’ve done to their character. The attribution error, yes, but it’s an error that’s FUNDAMENTAL. We look at the incarcerated and we think, they are there because they are bad people. We don’t think it was a manifestation of their environment, or the range of choices they were given. The book forces to grapple with questions of society, individuality, justice, rage, reform. Which brings us to my only real note.

This next part comes down to a matter of taste: There were parts of the book that did feel like an “introduction to abolition” course at a higher institution. For me, it was never in a way that felt disingenuous, never in a way that felt shoehorned in. The best example of this is the chapter “Interview,” where Mari, who’s an abolitionist, is interviewed at a protest by a reporter, and the conversation circles around the questions that you might find in an ethics class: You want rapists and murderers to go free? What about the victims? What about the victims families? How can you advocate for the release of those who have done so much harm? Who might do harm again?

These are of course questions we as readers might have, when we look at people like Simon J. Craft, who raped and murdered women and then, after having signed up for the murder games, slaughtered four people within a matter of minutes. Or when we hear about Sunset Harkness’s crimes, which were similar to Craft’s. The chapter was placed in the story at a time in which the empathy for Links is high, and brings more focus to the situation: How come the people tolerate the games? We know these people have been convicted of likely the greatest of crimes, but on the heels of the revelation that Staxxx’s crime was merely defending herself, here is a reminder that the people in Chain-Gang have victims, and those victims have families, and vengeance is a potent at obstructing justice. How do you look a family who’s lost someone in the eye and tell them that they should protest the treatment of that the victimizer?Mari’s response, then, to the reporter (who admittedly was being incredibly unprofessional, in a way I don’t know would have happened in real life) was a response to the reader. It was a conversation Adjei-Brenyah was having with the reader.

Normally I don’t like things like this. It’s fiction, and preaching and soapboxing so rarely comes across as anything but tacky when you’re telling a story in a fictional world. This book was an exception for me, because it felt grounded in the story. It felt like it COULD happen, no matter how unlikely — and since it’s unlikely that we’ll ever see the advent of prison killing games in our society, but we believe it COULD happen, that’s enough for me. To that end, if he hadn’t handled it the way he did, sprinkled here and there, tucked into a larger narrative, then that might’ve taken away from the rating. As it is though, it didn’t affect the book for me, and so I leave it at five stars.

The book wasn’t perfect, of course, no book is. Some dialogue felt a little clunky, and though I didn’t find it a problem, there are a few characters we simply cannot get to fully know within the novel because there are so many of them. I think this was a good choice on Adjei-Brenyah’s part, because part of extending empathy to human beings is knowing we cannot know their whole story, but sometimes I wondered about what I didn’t know about certain characters and I wouldn’t have minded more chapters on them.

But these problems didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the book in the least. It didn’t take away from the impact.

I borrowed this book from the library, but I can confidentially say, having finished it, that I’m going to need to buy a copy for myself. It was that good.

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kaitlinreads17's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad tense fast-paced

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

5.0

I rate this book a 6

Content Warnings

kaeleigh's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

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katy_heath's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative sad fast-paced

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

4.5

Content Warnings

lisacanteven's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional tense slow-paced

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

4.0

This book was way out of my comfort zone, but I think I did well with it. CGAS is a character driven story that takes us through an alternate future (or is it?) of what the beast of the prison industrial system becomes, where inmates fight each other gladiator style to the death for three years to earn their early freedom. The reader is left with the question, does prison really reform a person if they are forced to kill others for sport? This book just proves that prison is not about reforming a person; it never has been. In this future, prison evolves to be about entertainment for the masses. Prison is no longer just about slave labor and capital punishment- now there is sport about it.

Each chapter is aptly named instead of numbered- most chapters are pretty short. Each chapter also contains a specific POV, one that takes a little bit of reading into the chapter before you figure it out. I felt like the first half of the book I was being introduced to new characters every few chapters just to never hear from them again. This is the reason I couldn't give CGAS a perfect rating. I just felt lost sometimes. Even at the end of the book, I had to read the ending a few times just to make sure I had a solid grasp on how it ended.

As far as character development goes, this was brilliantly done. I felt like I was there with the characters at times, and because of this I feel like a sequel would be great. There is much more to do in this alternate future (hopefully) to do to make things right.

What I did find very unique to this book was the footnotes. The author included footnotes, some related to the story, while some were plucked from our reality and given as facts to educate the reader on just how close this is to becoming our future.

Content Warnings

cehood's review

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challenging dark informative sad tense 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? Yes

5.0

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