This book completely knocked the air out of me.

It’s one of those reads that doesn’t just tell a story, it keeps pulling you back into yourself while you’re reading it. It made me uncomfortable, emotional, overwhelmed, and deeply reflective in a way that didn’t really let go, even after I stopped reading.

At first, the multiple POVs felt almost disorienting. I kept asking myself who I’m supposed to follow, who the main voice is, who I’m meant to care about. It felt uneven, like I couldn’t quite get my footing in the story. But the more I read, the more I realised that this instability isn’t accidental. It mirrors the world the characters exist in, one where nothing is stable, nothing is fair, and no one is ever truly in control of their own narrative.

The structure of the Chain-Gang system itself already sets the tone, but every additional perspective makes it heavier. It becomes less about individual characters and more about an entire machine that everyone is trapped inside, in different ways.

The writing is very direct, almost stripped down at times, and that makes it hit harder. There’s no hiding behind overly poetic language or emotional cushioning. The story just shows you things as they are and expects you to sit with them.

The footnotes especially stood out to me. They constantly break the flow of the story, pulling you out of the fictional world and back into real-world history and systems. At times it felt disruptive, but I think that was the point. It doesn’t let you stay comfortably inside the fiction, it keeps reminding you that so much of this is already rooted in reality. As someone not from the U.S., that part was especially unsettling but also eye-opening.

The themes in this book are heavy and layered: surveillance, racism, class, misogyny, capitalism, incarceration, mental health, homophobia, and the way society decides who is worthy of empathy and who isn’t. But what stuck with me most is the question it keeps circling back to: what happens when we only extend humanity to people we approve of?

The characters themselves are messy, flawed, often violent, and the book doesn’t try to clean that up. It lets them be complicated. It makes you empathise with them without letting you forget what they’ve done, or what has been done to them. That tension is constant, and it’s what makes the story so powerful.

What really stayed with me is how connected everything is. There is no outside perspective, no neutral ground. Everyone is part of the system in some way, whether as participant, audience, or prisoner. And that’s what makes it feel so suffocating and so real at the same time.

This isn’t a comforting read. It’s intense, heavy, and emotionally exhausting. But it’s also incredibly sharp, intentional, and hard to forget.