Taking place in a (more) dystopian United States, Adjei-Brenyah jumps straight into it and pulls the reader into a world where prisoners are given the option to fight to the death, gladiator-style, in exchange for freedom… assuming they survive. Furthermore, this is broadcasted to the world as entertainment. I was and continue to be haunted by the thought that the ideas presented in this novel are not entirely farfetched, that they could very well happen today or in the near future.

I’ll admit that this novel didn’t entirely work for me, mostly because there was a lot of jumping around between character perspectives that made it hard to follow the story. However, I can’t deny that this is a vitally important book that needs to be read to better understand—even if slightly—why prison abolition is needed. I’m still (un)learning things, and I found the footnotes in the novel informative but also chilling, knowing that they were actual facts about incarceration in the United States.

I will say that Adjei-Brenyah absolutely floored me with one sentence from this novel: “I thought of how the world can be anything and how sad it is that it’s this.” I still remember being hit by a wave of grief and anger after reading this line, thinking how applicable it is to our world as it is right now. I thought about how Black people deserve so much more than this current world. I also found that I was thinking a lot about the atrocities committed and that continue to be committed by the U.S. government, and how millions of people deserve a better world than the one we’re living in.

To echo the words of a few characters from this novel, “Suck my dick, America.”