dom's spotlight: 06/14/23

Chain Gang All Stars : A Novel

“Love and abolition are the same thing.”

At a panel in Seattle, surrounded by genre writers and booksellers, publishers and bibliophiles, these words left Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s mouth. Chills ran up and down my spine, and I could feel a swell and a hush over everyone in the room.

Chills ran through me again when I closed Chain-Gang All-Stars. I was ruined for days. How could the sentences be so electric, the characters so visceral, the violence so intense, the compassion so encapsulating? In a story of a future not so far away, privatized prisons have branded a new gladiator game where the incarcerated compete in a bloody contest to gain their ‘High Freedom’, a gory competition that tells us about America’s past, present, and sad future.

The amount of passion, love, and care in this book upsets in its beauty and rages in its plea; an asking of “How much longer can this violence be sustained?'“ The cast of characters stick to your ribs and the jumping of perspective not only gives you a panorama of the damage done by a system that no longer (or has never) cared for the well being of it’s population, but glues your butt to the seat of capitalistic destruction while never forgetting the humanity of every single individual involved in the calamity known as The American Experiment.

This one should needs to be on everyone’s TBR, regardless of your niche.

This is what genre can do.

Buy the book HERE.

Buy Adjei-Brenyah’s short story collection (an equally stunning piece of work) HERE.