Chain Gang All Stars is an audacious novel that brutally examines today's bloodlust, endless need for entertainment and the human cost when you know you're already dead, so you might as well offer yourself up as a competitor in gladiator battles.
In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's debut novel, some convicts have the chance to sign up as combatants in death battles. Any who survive three years may see freedom. None have ever made it that far, but one is two battles away. Loretta Thurwar's first battle was to kill the original queen warrior. Thurwar is the leader of her chain, the group of "players" who train and travel the battle circuit together. Their group is dealing with the slaying of their last leader, who also was on the cusp of earning his freedom. And she's battling feeling human by loving another in her chain.
Hurricane Staxx is beloved by the mobs watching the programs because of her disdain for the spectacle, her preaching of love, and her murderous skills. Before she killed and was imprisoned, she had promise to thrive as a charismatic person. The way she inspires a former schoolmate is an important look at the breadth and depth of the society created in the novel.
She forced love into this loveless space, made it the subject of her life. She showed them that she, the Hurricane, was capable of great love, and that if they'd look they'd see they were too.
There are people who are addicted to the violence of the battles and to watching the live feeds of the combatants outside the arena. There are people who hate that they are at least curious. And there are people who love their bloodlust and who love their own notoriety by proximity to the warriors. It's more complicated than it first appears:
Everybody was looking for the same thing in a lot of different ways.
The world and the characters created to fill it are fascinating. They also are gruesome. The violence is explicit from the opening of the story.
But in our world, where violence and hatred thrive, this is important commentary on the ways some people are compelled to lash out. And it's no accident that the incarcerated in this novel, set in the near future, are as likely to be Black as in our world now. When characters talk about being enslaved and how they are already dead, it resonates with history and current times.
"Sometimes you can cry if you do it quiet enough" refers to the shocks that can come from the magcuffs implanted in all of the prisoners. It also recalls the feelings of enslaved people working the fields and those who have lost their freedom today.
At the same time, Adjei-Brenyah vividly describes the feelings and even hopes and dreams, no matter how far out of reach they appear, of his characters. Which makes the world they live in all the more heartbreaking.
Chain Gang All Stars is not an easy read, because of the violence, but it is centered in an open look at what makes us tick.
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