Solidarity Stories Book Club: "Chain-Gang All-Stars" by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
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Join the Prince George’s County Office of Human Rights and Mount Rainier Branch Library for our monthly book club! This month we hope you can join us as we discuss Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, a national best seller and finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction (2024).
Solidarity Stories Book Club takes place on the 3rd Tuesday of each month in the upstairs lounge area of miXt Food Hall in Brentwood, MD. Limited parking is available via the garage on 39th St & Rhode Island Ave. Parking is free for program participants and no purchase is required, but participants are welcome to order snacks, drinks, or dinner from miXt’s vendors. For more information, visit their website: mixtfoodhall.com.
About the Book
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of the 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 before 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, Thurwar 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 from a “new and necessary American voice.”
—From Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review
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