CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS, first novel is an out-of-the-park home run

CHAIN-GANG ALL-STARS
NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH
Pantheon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.95* of five

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 LOCUS AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL!

FINALIST FOR THE ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD!

The Publisher Says: Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own.

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE's corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar's path have devastating consequences.

Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system's unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, or C.A.P.E., doesn't feel satirical. It feels nauseatingly predictive. This first novel, by the author of the excellent story collection Friday Black (my all-but five star review at the link), is a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in presented in less than a week's time.

The horrors of imprisonment aren't new. Neither is it news that African-Americans are disproportionately affected by those horrors. The horrible prevalence of carceral solutions to minor infractions started their rise with the ludicrous "War on Drugs" that was utterly ineffective at its stated goal, but gigantically successful at creating inmates for an increasingly corporatized and profit-driven prison system.

This novel's a shout of outrage, a howl of fury and grief, a klaxon of warning about this facet of the dehumanizing and victimizing of people of color by the racist system of "justice" in place in the US. It's equally effective as an anti-capitalist bellow of rage at the unchecked quest for profit above all other goals that is doing so much to actively destroy the planet's biosphere...that we all live in...with its greed.

We start our visit to a barely-fictionalized present-day US with a violent scene of battle brought to us by the CAPE (Criminal Action Penal Entertainment) program. Take a moment, please, to view this acronym. Look at the cultural tie-backs; the superhero comic-book culture polluting my screens for a decade now gets a brickbat right away, as does the Orwellian alphabet soup so prevalent in modern governmental bowls of gruel served to the needy (SNAP, WIC, AFDC and the like). This is Author Adjei-Brenyah's most well-honed talent: In Friday Black, he invented the slang term "shoelookers" for socially awkward teens unable or unwilling to meet their peers' or anyone else's gaze. This is a writer with an excellent ear serving a flensing-knife of an eye. Nothing in this read has any less sharp a perception or a usage case behind it. That is probably the most discomfiting thing about the novel: As I admired his wordsmithery, I realize the point of the red-hot blade he was forging was aimed squarely at me. Old white man, privileged and pampered by a system designed to coddle and comfort me. Well. That's me told.

So it is...and most of y'all, too. You won't necessarily like this part of your reading experience, if my own is any guide; I don't think it should, in your minds, present an excuse for you not to make the effort to read it. If the world has justice in its sharing-out of cultural kudos, this novel will win the National Book Award for Fiction in a few days' time. The reason I want it to is that it shouts the quiet part out loud in a cultural landscape of politely, passively sleepwalking into a new authoritarian era of unspeakable, horrifying intentions. The people trying to gain control of the world aren't troubling to hide their intentions, either, except to say blandly homogenized inoffensive acronymic things...or exactly what Author Adjei-Brenyah is warning us about so very effectively in Chain-Gang All-Stars.

If I'm honest, that is also a problem with the read. It is a warning. A story that, while I believe in its worldbuilding, is still meant to tell me something uncomfortable about my world. Historically, awards aren't always willing to put their celebratory wreaths on creative projects that poke people hard in their painful spots. I very much don't want that to be the case for Chain-Gang All-Stars, but it could easily lose the public lauding that the National Book Award for Fiction represents just based on what juries often refer to as "controversial ideas." I want all y'all to go get the book and engage with it on the intellectual level; the carrot to that perceived stick is a story that could easily be a superb action flick, unremittingly violent and all with genuinely elevated stakes...no one could ever fight for their literal life and have it be mellow. Reading the story on that level is exciting, as it is when you read the Reacher books that fly off the shelves. That's not my reading sweet spot. I look at it, frankly, as the cheese wrapped around the pill that you need to get down the dog's throat.

If I'm committed to that metaphor, I will say it's a bit like using Roquefort for the purpose. Rich, creamy, power-packed flavorsome stuff. Rare and expensive (in lost illusions). Hard to find the real, genuinely, ethically sourced stuff.

Here it is.

THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI, intense and urgent and deeply necessary reading

THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI
UZMA ASLAM KHAN
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Nomi and Zee are Local Borns—their father a convict condemned by the British to the Andaman Islands, their mother shipped off with him. The islands are an inhospitable place, despite their surreal beauty. In this unreliable world, the children have their friend Aye, the pet hen Priya and the distracted love of their parents to shore them up from one day to the next. Meanwhile, within the walls of the prison, Prisoner 218 D wages a war on her jailers with only her body and her memory.

When war descends upon this overlooked outpost of Empire, the British are forced out and the Japanese move in. Soon the first shot is fired and Zee is forced to flee, leaving Nomi and the other islanders to contend with a new malice. The islands—and the seas surrounding them—become a battlefield, resulting in tragedy for some and a brittle kind of freedom for others, who find themselves increasingly entangled in a mesh of alliances and betrayals.

Ambitiously imagined and hauntingly alive, The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali writes into being the interwoven stories of people caught in the vortex of history, powerless yet with powers of their own: of bravery and wonder, empathy and endurance. Uzma Aslam Khan’s extraordinary new novel is an unflinching and lyrical page-turner, an epic telling of a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the subcontinent.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

“Have you noticed that when men want freedom, the conversation is about the nature of action, violence or non-violence? But when women want freedom, the conversation is about the nature of women, natural or unnatural?”
–and–
Somewhere in the great sky beyond this sky of planes was a star made entirely of words. And on the star lived as many different kinds of words as birds in all the skies, fish in all the seas, and clay patterns in all the hands of adoring women. Some words were cautious as the crabs nesting on the beach. Others, bold as the giant hornbills prattling in the trees. Then there were those that made no sound, but were equally fearless, folding their arms and waiting for her to sit on their lap. The prisoner who was no longer a prisoner was gathering all these many words to herself and would speak them, if there were but someone to listen, even a little.

The reason to read, or not to read, this story is there in those quotes. There are adults imprisoned in this story, adults whose sufferings are inflicted on bodies as well as souls; their children are, revoltingly but oddly mercifully, imprisoned with them in a soul-warping hothouse of rage and mistrust...but with their loving (if distracted) parents. These strands are braided throughout this intense, powerful, experiential read.

The bones of the story...a political prison on the Andaman Islands during WWII is attacked by the Japanese, slaughter is heaped on torture, and through it all a family makes a life amid the death...are unfamiliar to most of us in the US. The existence of the Andamans, those odd and liminal boundary markers between marine biomes and cultural fault lines between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, is probably unfamiliar even to geographically savvy folk here. Unless, of course, they're familiar with that idiotic spiritual imperialist who got himself murdered by the North Sentinelese isolationists. (Got what he deserved, in my never-remotely humble opinion.) These islands are very charged with an intense and irresistible energy for storytellers. Author Khan is the one who should be trusted to tell you the saga of their restless spirits.

I can't really imagine it's a spoiler to reveal that the British Raj wasn't too terribly popular with quite a lot of the people they ruled. If you haven't heard of the Mahatma, take a quick peek at Wikipedia and then come back. He wasn't alone; he didn't work in isolation; and he wasn't the first freedom fighter on the Indian subcontinent. The parents in this story are, like the Mahatma, resisters of British imperial rule of India. For their beliefs and the actions they inspired them to take, they're imprisoned in the Cellular Jail. This hellscape was built after the 1857 Indian Rebellion exploded the political-prisoner population the British detained.

History lesson aside, though it's very much not an aside but a central part of the experience of this read, the story Author Khan tells us is a deeply personal one. Nomi Ali, a Muslim child, is brought up with her brother in the Cellular Jail's ambit...and, odd as it sounds, it's...just a childhood. An abnormal one to the reader. Nomi doesn't really process this...she experiences the pains of growing up as the child of adults who are distracted, whose attention doesn't center on her or her needs. The awfulness an adult reader barely needs to infer, it feels so pervasive to us, isn't her issue. She feels alone. Her life isn't, in her observation, very important or even all that interesting. So she finds companionship and she comes of age in this stew of people who have only one thing in common: the colonial oppressors want them kept away from their homes enough to isolate them thoroughly. In the ordinary course of her life, Nomi wouldn't have encountered a Burmese person, or lived in a place with an Indigenous population older than her own ancestors, or been directly in the path of the Japanese army as they swept through South Asia.

Brutal as the British were as jailers, the Japanese arrived to add much more misery...need I remind anyone of the "comfort women" and their heinous sufferings?...to the existing awfulness. For Nomi, though, this is...life. She gets on with the task of being alive and growing up.

It is for that reason that I kept reading this chronicle in multiple voices of the horrors of war in a colonial setting. I was not taken with the author's choice to spread her narrative over multiple points of view and multiple strands of time. It was an extra call on my attention, an extra demand to retain details, that seemed to me to be unnecessary to make the larger point. Author Khan was asking that I invest in many lives, but shallowly; had I been given a choice, I would've invested in Nomi very deeply, and her story would still have enabled the deep interrogation of the immorality of colonialism and its inevitable offshoot, war.

I would not in any way recommend that you shy away from reading this story. I want it to be part of all of our mental furniture, to fix itself in the legendarium of World War II. The urgency and the passion of Author Khan's storytelling voice will woo resistant readers into investing in a painful read, I honestly believe, and the story told is one of such tremendous relevance and urgency in 2022. We're witnessing analogous events unfold in Xinjiang. We're watching in horror as Mariupol and Kramatorsk see vile crimes against children, therefore against the future of humanity itself, perpetrated by invaders bent on territorial occupation. We aren't entitled to remain ignorant of the ways that impacts those who suffer it.

But it's entirely too much to doomscroll the day away, to surrender to a helpless wretchedness. So turn, as I always have and recommend that you do too, to the past perfect, the completed action that explains and illuminates the present. This novel will give you furniture to rest your unanchored anguish and rage on. Nomi, and the characters around her, will afford us in our privileged isolation from the physical realities of war, a trellis to grow the vines of empathy into maturity. I hope they will root strongly in you, and bloom flowers of yellow and blue tolerance and understanding.

Understanding the experience of war, as THE MIRACULOUS TRUE HISTORY OF NOMI ALI affords you the opportunity to do, might lead to more compassionate actions in one's own sphere of reality. This true story, told as a novel, gives you the chance to think through the consequences of inattention and indifference.