2023 novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Chain-Gang All-Stars is the 2023 debut novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. It was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, as well as other awards.
Plot.
"Chain-Gang All-Stars" is set in a dystopian near-future America where prison systems have been transformed into a brutal, televised blood sport called the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment (CAPE) program. This system pits inmates, known as "Chain-Gang All-Stars," against each other in deadly gladiatorial combat for the entertainment of the masses and potential freedom for the surviving victors. The story centers around Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker, two of CAPE's most famous combatants and partners in life and battle.
Loretta is close to securing her freedom, having only a few more fights left, but she is deeply entangled in the moral and emotional complexities of CAPE. Torn between the desire to escape and her loyalty to her partner Staxxx, Loretta faces the harrowing decision of leaving or resisting the system that has commodified and dehumanized her. Throughout the novel, other fighters' perspectives reveal the extent of the system’s cruelty and manipulation, as well as the resilience, resistance, and trauma of those forced into this deadly game.
Adjei-Brenyah tackles themes of systemic racism, the prison-industrial complex, exploitation, and the spectacle of violence in media. Through a blend of speculative and social critique, "Chain-Gang All-Stars" offers a chilling reflection on society's capacity for both dehumanization and resilience, challenging readers to examine where entertainment, profit, and justice intersect in harmful ways.
Development.
Adjei-Brenyah originally conceived "Chain Gang All-Stars" as a short story in his collection "Friday Black".
Reception.
"Chain-Gang All-Stars" was generally well received by critics, including starred reviews from "Booklist", "Kirkus Reviews", "Library Journal", and "Publishers Weekly".
"Kirkus Reviews" compared the novel to "a rowdy, profane, and indignant blues shout" version of "The Hunger Games". In "The Wall Street Journal", Sam Sacks also compared the novel to "The Hunger Games", as well as to "Squid Game", "Battle Royale", and "Invisible Man", though Sacks' review was more mixed, noting that "since the novel assails the exploitation of black prisoners for entertainment, it cannot be freely entertaining itself, and a dampening sense of shame and reluctance permeates the scenes, which are often interrupted by footnotes dispensing sobering statistics about the prison system—not the one in the novel but the real one." Sacks concluded: "A straightforwardly realistic novel about prisons would be infinitely more damning—though, paradoxically, it would never be selected for book clubs."
Contrary to Sacks's review, "Booklist"'s Terry Hong said that "Adjei-Brenyah's reality-adjacent tale could ultimately, terrifyingly, prove prescient." Hong explained: "What might seem to be a dystopian nightmare is even more terrifying because Adjei-Brenyah brilliantly broadcasts such irrefutable truths as the U.S. having the world's highest rate of incarceration, with disproportionate numbers of Black and POC prisoners. His chilling footnotes shrewdly interrupt his fiction with real names and stark statistics, exposing racism, inequity, corruption, suicide, and abuse." Hong concluded: "Given the rampant, explicit brutality, all should heed a character's warning, 'I'll tell you and I can't untell you, you understand?'"
Similarly, "Publishers Weekly" highlighted how "the author delivers insightful critiques of the prison-industrial complex, capitalism, and the ways in which Hollywood and celebrity culture exploit Black talent," while also indicating that "both the political allegory and the edge-of-your-seat action work beautifully."
"Library Journal"'s Sarah Hashimoto called "Chain-Gang All-Stars" "an unforgettable book reverberating with alarming truths and providing an uncomfortable look at an all-too-imaginable future".
Jennifer M. Brown, writing for "Shelf Awareness", called "Chain-Gang All-Stars a" "powerful, imaginative debut novel" that "pulls no punches in the parallels he draws between incarceration and slavery, unpaid labor and power imbalance". Brown concluded, "The story may be fiction, but Adjei-Brenyah delivers the truth."
Bidisha Mamata, writing for "The Observer", called the novel "crushingly painful" with "loaded and on-the-nose commentary on racism, exploitation, inequality and the legacy and loud echoes of slavery in the US." Like Sacks, Mamata felt that the richness of the conceit makes it tiresome to read [...] Even though the ideas are big and bold, the novel is a slog. In its characters’ endless cycle of violence, misery, trauma and rumination, all light and shade is lost. There is action in spades, but little real plot; dialogue, but little psychological nuance. We are told many of the condemned characters’ tragic backstories, often in poignantly throwaway footnotes...we do not feel them or feel for them. The main characters glower like video game characters and talk like CGI bounty hunters.Mamata indicated that "Adjei-Brenyah is clearly a writer of substance, with something to say" but thought readers should "skip" reading "Chain-Gang All-Stars" "and wait instead for pop culture to eat itself, shed all irony and churn out the inevitable Netflix adaptation".
Awards and honors.
"The New York Times" named "Chain-Gang All-Stars" one of the top ten books of 2023. "Kirkus Reviews" and "Shelf Awareness" also included it on their list of the year's best books. "Booklist" included it on their list of the top ten debut novels of the year.
References.
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