Like all truly remarkable speculative fiction, Chain-Gang All-Stars is deeply rooted in the real world even as it twists the circumstances. I read it alongside Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and the callout of some of the same real 8th Amendment cases in both Just Mercy and the footnotes of Chain-Gang was both impressive and also heartbreaking. It also made me think of one of my very first forays into speculative fiction, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist. Like that book, I suspect this one will stick with me for years. 

I literally do not have a single negative thing to say about this book and whatever the next thing Adjei-Brenyah publishes will be an auto-buy for me.