Written by Sasha Zatz
If you love gaming and teenage girls who stand up for their rights, you will adore Slay. It was important and moving, I just couldn’t put it down! The author was inspired to write it after watching Black Panther, so I thought it was smart to pick it up just after I watched the movie and I was not disappointed.
The novel follows Keira, who secretly developed Slay, an online gaming community where black people duel from all over the world. But when someone is shot because of the game, it’s all over the news…and Kiera doesn’t know what to do.
The plot was so engaging, entertaining, and impossible to put down – it will have you up at 2am reading. It was so immersive and interesting and it was definitely character-driven, but was exciting none the less!
“If black gamers want their own space online away from the eyes of the majority, let them have it. Y’all have Mummy and Legacy of Planets. Do you need to have everything?”
The characters are so lovable, especially Kiera and her younger sister, Steph. They felt like such real people with their struggles and insecurities. Kiera’s voice felt real and easy to relate to, her thoughts and opinions are great to read and the dynamic between the two sisters was absolutely beautiful to watch their relationship grow. The side characters, especially Claire aka Cicada, were awesome. It was awesome to see their lives and views occasionally dotted throughout the book, and from Kiera’s perspective too.
Slay, the game, was so interesting! It was fun to see quite a few scenes inside the game and how the rules worked, whether you game or not. I think a lot of gaming based books and even gaming, in general, are often very male-dominated so the feminist aspects of this book are awesome.
Slay was such an amazing and important book that I’d definitely recommend everyone picks up. It discusses race, identity, relationships, and more in such an important way at the same time as being impossibly fun to read. What a gem of a book!
Slay is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
Will you be reading Slay? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
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?
