Slay by Brittney Morris

Slay

Author: Brittney Morris

Publisher: Hodder Children's Books

Release date: October 2019

Pages: 318 pages

R.R.P: $17.99

'We are different ages, genders, tribes, tongues, and traditions... but tonight we SLAY.'

Black Panther meets Ready Player One. A fierce teen game developer 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 a college student, and one of the only black kids at Jefferson Academy. By night, she joins hundreds of thousands of black gamers who duel worldwide in the secret online role-playing card game SLAY.

N one knows Kiera is the game developer- not even her boyfriend, Malcolm. But when a teen in Kansis City is murdered over a dispute in the SLAY world, the media labels it an exclusionist, racist hub for thugs.

With threats coming from both inside and outside the game, Kiera must fight to save the safe space she's created. But can she protect SLAY without losing herself?

My Review

Thoughts on the book:  SLAY is the new novel doing the rounds in the bookstagram community from Brittney Morris. Kiera Johnson just wants to slide under the radar at her school and finish her final year with no big dramas, sounds easy right. But it's not as easy as that when your one of the only black kids are your school and your boyfriend prefers to only do and say things the way he believes they should be done, the Black way. But Kiera has her own relaxation remedy, she is the game developer, along with her online friend Cicada, of an all black secret online Virtual Reality game called SLAY. Here she is free to be who she feels she was meant to be and is joined by hundreds of thousands of like minded people like her. But when a fellow player is murdered over fake currency, Kiera's world is shattered and her whole concept of the game is brought out into the public eye. Everyone now has an opinion on her game and when someone gets onto the game that shouldn't be there and starts threating Kiera she is left wondering who to trust and whether she should even continue the game?

A massive thank you go Hachette Australia for sending out a copy of SLAYfor me to read and review. I finished SLAY a couple of days ago and have needed this break to really think hard about the book. My rating for SLAY has change so much over the last couple of days because when I originally finished it I was feeling a bit meh about the book but the longer I've sat on it the more I've grown to love the book and what it stands for. 

In SLAY we get to learn so much about black culture and how they are affected in every day life still to this day and we also got to see two different sides of how people Who are black choose to live their lives. Kiera accepted that she's black and she's learnt to live with white friends and Malcolm on the other hand prefers to only do things the black way and basically chooses to denounce the white way whenever he can and this becomes more and more evident as the story goes along. We also get to see that there are all different types of black people and there's not necessarily one type that fits all. This is evident in that the fact that the moderator Cicada, is a French black person and even the main character Keira turns around and says that she wasn't aware that there were really black people in France and that most of the time you only see pictures of White people enjoying croissant's and cups of coffee enjoying the French countryside. This means that even black people stereotype their own people and it was really good to see the author exploring this. In a way I wish that we got more of a chance to explore the black community.

One of my favourite parts of SLAY is the relationships that Kiera had and learning about how the SLAY game worked. The author had written the novel with Kierra having a white best friend and then there was the developing friendship between her fellow moderator of the game Cicada who was a fellow black girl. It was interesting to see the differences in the way their relationships were. It seems like Kiara was able to talk more freely with Cicada about a lot more issues because it was as if she felt that being black she would understand more where she struggles talking with Harper about those same issues. A perfect example is when Harper asked if Kiera believed that white people could have dreadlocks or if it was just a black thing. Kiera believe that she couldn't give an appropriate answer because she didn't stand for the whole black community. But as the novel progressed we did see A change in half hour and she didn't come around to saying how things were different between the two cultures and she did try to understand how Keira felt in certain situations.

I think the author has done an amazing job of picking a strong storyline that many people will grab the book just to read because it has something for everyone: it has a mystery of who is blackmailing Kiera (which I was so wrong about) it has virtual reality, amazing game cards that are so appropriate to the game, tackles some big issues that teenagers of today are facing, it has black culture which is a big pull these days after The Hate You Give and it has an amazing main character that is female, strong minded, opinionated and one that many people will fall in love with when they get to know her. 

Rating: 4/5