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Slay

Slay

Current price: $39.99
Publication Date: September 24th, 2019
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster Audio
ISBN:
9781508296089
Pages:
0

SLAY is so much more than just another book about video games: it’s about a girl who carves a space in the world for herself and completely owns it, and it’s about the microaggressions and the can-I-touch-your-hairs and all the things that come with being one of a handful of black kids in a school. It isn’t afraid to pull punches where it counts; sometimes you see them coming, sometimes you don’t.

Avery Peregrine, Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, WA
Fall 2019 Kids Indie Next List

My inner gamer nerd is over the moon. I lost any sense that I was reading from a page during the gaming interludes. What a vision of a VR-based MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game)! Black women in STEM and Black gamers are celebrated and centered, and white readers have the opportunity to explore their whiteness and how exhausting it is to be tokenized.

Kim Raymoure, Queen Anne Book Company, Seattle, WA
Winter 2020 Reading Group Indie Next List

Description

"The YA debut we're most excited for this year." --Entertainment Weekly "A book that knocks you off your feet while dropping the kind of knowledge that'll keep you down for the count. Prepare to BE slain." --Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin and Odd One Out Ready Player One meets The Hate U Give in this dynamite debut novel that follows a fierce teen game developer as she battles a real-life troll intent on ruining the Black Panther-inspired video game she created and the safe community it represents for Black gamers.By day, seventeen-year-old Kiera Johnson is an honors student, a math tutor, and one of the only Black kids at Jefferson Academy. But at home, she joins hundreds of thousands of Black gamers who duel worldwide as Nubian personas in the secret multiplayer online role-playing card game, SLAY. No one knows Kiera is the game developer, not her friends, her family, not even her boyfriend, Malcolm, who believes video games are partially responsible for the "downfall of the Black man." But when a teen in Kansas City is murdered over a dispute in the SLAY world, news of the game reaches mainstream media, and SLAY is labeled a racist, exclusionist, violent hub for thugs and criminals. Even worse, an anonymous troll infiltrates the game, threatening to sue Kiera for "anti-white discrimination." Driven to save the only world in which she can be herself, Kiera must preserve her secret identity and harness what it means to be unapologetically Black in a world intimidated by Blackness. But can she protect her game without losing herself in the process?