Review: Slay by Brittney Morris

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?

How does one break a book down like this and review it like a not crazy fan girl…. They don't. Not if they're me. 

This book is everything. Like really everything. It can be so hard to walk through two worlds. In one world, you don't have to check every word you say, you don't have to feel like you're other, you don't wonder if you're going to be treated different from the people around you. And for the love of all that is holy you don't have to answer questions about your hair. Did I have 3 feet of hair last week? No I didn't. So yes, these are extensions. 

Kiera wanted a world where she could be herself 100%. She wanted to congregate around others who knew that "your black is not my black and your weird I'd not my weird and your beautiful is not my beautiful and that's okay." Y'all I almost fell out in tears when I read that. I will buy that shirt off of whoever makes it. I’ll buy one in every color.

This book was about so much more than black girls in gaming. It’s about knowing that your black enough regardless of skin tone, linguistics, or too many other things to list. This book is about being a strong, proud, black person in the best way that you can so long as it’s uplifting to those around you. We, particularly those of us who feel isolated, need to find each other, uplift each other, accept each other, and build the community that we all need whether we realize it not.

That’s all I have for now. I recommend this book for everyone. Read it in your classrooms, read it with your kids. Talk. About. This. There’s mention of having sex without stigma but no actualy sex so move past it and read this book if you do nothing else this year.