Book Review: Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

What is Chain-Gang All-Stars about?

Chain-Gang All-Stars is a dystopian, nerve-shattering indictment of the US criminal justice system, as told through the eyes of televised gladiators who must kill for their freedom.

Note: This book review of Chain-Gang All-Stars is part of my shameless SEO-driven book-marketing strategy.

Book review of Chain-Gang All-Stars

It only takes about ten pages of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel for one character to get their skull smashed by a giant hammer and another to lose a limb to a scythe called LoveGuile. 

Shocked? Good.

Welcome to Chain-Gang All-Stars, brought to you by the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment program. Oh, and WholeMarket™. We can’t forget the sponsors. Let’s get a close-up on that lovely logo. Thanks for tuning in.

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

Adjei-Brenyah throws us headfirst into his mad dystopian world, where convicts, or “Links,” engage in mortal combat for a (long) shot at freedom, with every moment of their (short) lives televised to millions of viewers. 

Some bouts are evenly matched. These are heroic gladiators fighting to the death. In others, we watch weaklings with comically useless household objects pitted against veteran killers wielding medieval weaponry. 

Yet Chain-Gang All-Stars is so much more than bloodsport. 

Those first, ultra-violent pages give way to a deeper exploration of an inhumane criminal justice system nauseatingly similar to our own. If we set aside the futuristic drone cameras, magnetic restraint systems, and advanced at-home viewing technology, we are left with American prisons, plain and cruel.

People, often people of color and victims of violence themselves, commit crimes, often because they have no other choice. They are summarily convicted and stuffed into cells, where they are psychologically and physically brutalized, and may lose their lives to other inmates. And all the while, owners of private prison corporations — typically white men — get richer, exchanging human lives for another billion on the bottom line.

That is what this book is about. 

Also, it’s also a queer love story. And an expert demonstration of character voices. And a portrayal of humility, sacrifice, loyalty, humor, resilience, and bravery.

This book is about humans trapped inside of a humanity-destroying machine.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Woven into the gears, as footnotes, Adjei-Brenyah presents fragments of backstory that make even the most diabolical Links sympathetic, and, even more directly, facts about the US criminal justice system that hit as hard as a war hammer.

Fact: Slavery is illegal in the US except as a punishment for a crime.

Fact: Black men in the US are almost six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men.

Fact: The US keeps more prisoners in solitary confinement than another other democratic country.

Fact: Solitary confinement has been associated with panic attacks, depression, hallucinations, paranoia, anxiety, and memory loss.

Fact: Eighty-six percent of women in jail have experienced sexual violence.

The list, sadly, goes on with the show.

The next two Links are called into the arena, to kill or be killed.

Because this is America, where the masses demand blood, and the shareholders demand revenue.

But still the prisoners demand love. 

Even more than freedom, the prisoners demand love, and through the pages of this shocking debut, we hear Adjei-Brenyah demanding it for them. With every drop of blood he spills, he pumps a second drop through the heart, returning to love again and again, a refrain of the damned and soon to be departed. 

In Adjei-Brenyah’s world, the heroes understand that love does not conquer all — it is all.