Chain Gang All Stars imagines a future where for-profit prisons expand into mass media sports, giving prisoners with life prison sentences the opportunity to fight in gladiator battles. If they survive for three years, they earn their freedom. This book draws from the history of slavery, imprisonment and the death penalty (often with footnotes of historical context) and merges it with modern day issues like the the commodification of black bodies in sports and the constant stream of suffering and victimization that we see on the news and social media. 

All of the characters in this book are deeply flawed people: rapists, murders, abusers, Nazis, etc. But the book provides them and interiority and treats them with respect regardless of the crimes they might have committed. You end up likening and rooting for these people, even if their pasts disgust you. It also grapples with some of the hard to answer questions of abolition: should dangerous people be freed? Can bad people become good? There’s no one concrete answer provided, as all the character grapple with those questions themselves. One thing is made clear though, and it’s that no one deserves the torture and inhumanity of imprisonment as we practice it today. The ending is perfectly ambiguous in a way that might leave some people frustrated, but I found it a fitting way to break the cycles apparent in the book.

I was unsure whether Thurwar was gonna pull a Bishop and Sunset and allow herself to be killed to further Staxxx’s life, but I like that she survived. She gets to break that cycle and maybe change things. Or maybe not.

It’s a very human ending to me.

Definitely check out the content warnings before reading. I think that everything was very tastefully done and nothing was described too graphically, but everyone’s tolerance will be different. The author has a very beautiful and lyrical style to his words that provides some distance to the actual horrors happening on the page. 

Really my only nitpick is the repetition that’s used throughout the book. I think it’s used wayyy to much, and while I understand what it’s going for, it just ends up being grating to read.