CHAIN-GANG ALL STARS
by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Recommended if you enjoy: high action, near future political critique, and stories exploring criminal justice systems
Chain-Gang All Stars takes place in a near future US where live entertainment sports and the criminal justice system have merged. Capital punishment has become a spectator sport where incarcerated people fight to the death in live sports events gladiator style—complete with corporate sponsorships, live television broadcasts and a side reality TV show.
The book follows in the tradition of many prophetic science fiction stories that pull on current day trends and extrapolate them just a bit further to imagine where they might lead if we don’t course correct. The world he crafts is uncomfortably close both in terms of the technology he imagines as well as the cultural and economic practices that could allow this world. What is particularly striking about his writing is the footnotes sprinkled throughout combine both fiction and current day reality related to criminal justice laws and statistics, challenging the reader to sort out what’s a current day practice that’s already dystopian and stranger than fiction.
For a story that is hard hitting and political, the author manages to not be didactic and explores the challenges of an abolitionist framework that imagines a world without prisons. He takes on the difficult questions of alternatives such as in a striking scene in which an activist in interviewed by a journalist at a protest about why she opposes the practice.
The narration alternates characters from chapter to chapter—something that I enjoyed to experience the story from multiple perspectives but may be challenging for some readers who don’t enjoy that fragmentation. Some chapters are sparse and not immediately clear (something reminiscent of William Faulker’s chapter in As I Lay Dying when he writes only “My mother is a fish.”) but they all pay off and are explained as you continue. And, they offer an interesting mix of literary form in between high action detailed fight scenes. The alternating narrators also offers the opportunity to humanize the people incarcerated and grounds the book in engaging storytelling.
Overall, if you appreciate near future political critiques rendered in creative, high paced and humanized storytelling this is a book to check out.
-Sara