[Review] Slay by Brittney Morris

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."
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?

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.

This story read a lot like The Hate U Give meets Ready Player One. Beyond the struggle of hiding her identity as a game developer, she also has to struggle with the conflict of being in a predominantly white school. 

Morris addresses different kinds of racism and sexism and that was what made me keep on reading - it's important to understand that racism can exist between people of the same race, and it shouldn't be about putting someone down to emerge out on top. 

Malcolm makes me feel guilty for not being "black enough," .... He's pro-black and antiwhite, two ideologies that sometimes overlap but are not the same thing. He's pro a lot of things, but to realize he's not as progressive as I thought - that's hard for me to admit. - p. 175

I liked and didn't like the plot, or in this case, the multiple plots, of Slay. There were many things being thrown to us, with the POVs constantly alternating back and forth between Kiera and a person connected to SLAY, whether it was Cicada or the professor speaking on the effects of SLAY or some businessman that would play a bigger role later in the story. Their jarring and brief introductions temporarily took me out of the story whenever we got into their POVs, and sometimes, their roles were so brief that I wished that there was only Kiera's POV all along. 

Kiera and Malcolm's relationship was also presented in a very one-dimensional way. I wish there was more nuance to Malcolm's character (I can understand being angry, but to go against your girlfriend? Towards something she built her whole life around?). There was a forced need to cast a character as a stereotypical villain, and I just wish that there was more complexity around his character. 

The card game itself was pretty cool, and it reminded me of Warcross, with its virtual reality nature. It a game that celebrated blackness in such an innovative way. 

I do think that this book is important for its celebration of black excellence and culture, and for its empowerment of WOC in STEM fields.