Slay by Brittney Morris
Rating: 3.5 stars
Published: September 24th 2019
Goodreads Synopsis:
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."Kiera Johnson leads a double life. By day she's an honors student at her school and one of the only black students at Jefferson Academy. By night she's the creator of SLAY, an mmorpg card-game. She's careful to keep the two lives apart, until one day, someone is killed over the game, causing a public outrage that might just reveal her secret.
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?
