Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023, Penguin Random House)
English language
Published May 5, 2023 by Penguin Random House.
A harsh - but deserved - look at today's American prison system, through the lens of a near-future "light" sci-fi setting
Adjei-Brenyah did an excellent job of bringing the characters to life and turning them into people fighting a rigged system that doesn't view them that way
Content warning Describes vaguely how the book ends
The author used to organize for prison abolition and his sci-fi novel is based on a future world where people in U.S. prisons are asked to choose to participate in a death match that is streamed live all over U.S. It was hard to read at the beginning because of all of the gory descriptions but once I got through that it was a very entertaining but tragic tale of how violent our current systems are and how much worse it can get.
Even though I know about how prison officers wield power in prison, every time I read about what they do, it feels new every time to read how stark the contrast in power is. This book is as good as they are saying it to be. I hope it gets made into a big Hollywood movie. There is so much here that was gripping from the beginning to the end.
I kept wishing for the book to end more positively than it did. Maybe that is sadly as far as we can get to.
