In Last Chance LIVE!, Death Row Inmates Compete for Their Lives — Read an Excerpt! (Exclusive)

Forget Squid Game — your new favorite faux reality show just dropped.

In author Helena Haywoode Henry’s debut young adult novel Last Chance LIVE!, the titular show is the most popular reality show in America — and 18-year-old death row inmate Eternity Price’s only chance at survival. “If America doesn’t vote for her, she loses the chance to appeal her sentence, and she’ll be executed within a week of being eliminated from the show,” the book’s official synopsis reads.

But Eternity’s never been popular, so she’s terrified that she’ll never get to go home, never get to see her brother Sincere again, but anything’s better than rotting away in a cell.

“Eternity never expected to find her first real friends in a reality TV house full of people battling for survival after being convicted of capital crimes, but that’s exactly what happens,” the synopsis continues. “So when she gets the opportunity to sabotage them and secure her own victory, she has a choice to make: protect the friendships and acceptance she’s always longed for at the cost of her own life, or sacrifice her newfound community.”

“I wrote Last Chance LIVE! to engage readers of all backgrounds in life’s foundational questions — how should we pursue justice? How should we show mercy? How do we decide what is true?” the author tells PEOPLE in an exclusive statement. “As I wrote Last Chance LIVE!, I found in Eternity a mirror to reflect on our society’s present and future circumstances: how our choices impact us individually and collectively, and where we — as people, and as a nation — are headed.”

Read an exclusive excerpt from Last Chance LIVE! below.

Death row is really white.

I never thought about death row ’til the week of trial. Then it was all I could think about. In my head it was dark and dank, creaky bars and no lights. Somewhere blacker than I am. Somewhere with ghosts.

But it’s not like that at all. More Martha than Snoop.

Everything is painted white. The walls, bars, bed, doors. And whatever’s not white is clouded steel. Lights so bright, walls so white, looks like a TV show hospital where babies are born. But it’s a trick.

This place is no hospital. Nobody’s taking my appendix out here.

Well actually, I guess they are.

No. Actually, they think they are.

I tell myself the same thing every day. Repeat it over and over with all the claps in the world. I’m. (Clap.) Not. (Clap.) Staying. (Clap.)

Here. (Clap.)

I’m not staying here.

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I didn’t decide I wasn’t staying ’til after my first week. I spent that whole week figuring out what my last meal was gonna be. I would sleep and dream, always about food, ’cause when you don’t get to eat nothing good, everything tastes better in your dreams. I was gonna do my last meal right. One shot, no redos.

Baked ziti with extra mozzarella, not too much sauce. Smoked brisket with potato salad and baked beans. Falafel. Pineapple salsa. Pad Thai with cilantro, peanuts, and extra crunchy sprouts. Vanilla ice cream with rainbow sprinkles, cookie dough bites, yellow cake pieces, large Heath bar chunks, strawberries, nonpareils, mochi, condensed milk, caramel sauce, whipped cream. Best of all — thick, buttery, garlicky Domino’s pan pizza with bacon and onions. Those nonpareils make your teeth crack, but it doesn’t matter if it’s the last meal you gonna have. Peanut butter and chocolate cereal. The good kind. None of that store-brand foolishness.

And I also spent that whole week figuring out what I would say to my little brother if I ever got the chance, if he somehow floated into this cell. His chub nose, full black cheeks that match his belly, long braids, wide eyes — finally in front of me. I’d try to make a joke asking how he even fit through the bars, waiting for him to call me some kinda fat too. I’d remind him how his blood’s the same as mine, and we’ve always been the same inside.

I’d beg him not to leave me.

I’d hope he’d whisper something I forgot about our mom, or tell me how he finally beat some game level we could never beat together. Maybe he’d laugh about how Pops used to put his favorite brand of ice cream out in the sun, to show us it was the best kind ’cause it never fully melted.

I’d tell Sincere I’m not gonna melt away in here.

But Sincere probably wouldn’t say any of that to me. He’d drop his jaw to the ground, chin on cement. Rattle the bars with his scream and swallow me into the black of his gape.

Put me in the darkness, where I really belong.

Not inside this bright-white cage.

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A few days in, I realized that I almost never spoke. I had no one to speak to, no reason to use my voice, except when COs asked me to repeat my number. So I started saying my list out loud. I didn’t want my voice to stop working.

Then Maria in the next cell heard me rehearsing my list and yelled that Texas doesn’t give you a last meal. You eat the same stuff they’ve been giving you every day of the week.

So I’m 18 and I’ve already eaten every good meal I’m ever gonna have. I’m 18 and all my home-cooked meals for the rest of my life are gonna come from the cook at the Patrick O’Daniel Unit, the prison for grown-up women, and me, way out in the middle of No One Cares, Texas, less than two hundred miles from Huntsville, the place where Texas says it’s gonna kill me.

So I’ll never eat barbacoa

I’ll never scroll on my phone again

I’ll never be kissed

I’ll never go to Disney World

I’ll never go home

Unless I get out.

When Maria told me there’s no last meal, I cried for an hour.

I sit up and pat my hairline to feel my edges wildin’ out. The fuzzed-up frizz looks like it’s never been laid a day in its life. I hate the thought of Nana staring at my jacked-up edges, judging me. They make me look like I’m in prison. Where Nana thinks I belong.

Step one: get my hair right. For Nana, but also — for Hollywood. I can’t be on TV if my edges ain’t right.

Only three ways to get out of here. The legal stuff, run, or fight.

Excerpted from Last Chance Live! Text © 2025 by Helena Haywoode Henry, published by Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC

Last Chance LIVE! will hit shelves on Oct. 7 and is available to preorder now, wherever books are sold.