Title: Slay
Author:
Brittney Morris
Read
by: Kiersey Clemon, Michael Boatman,
Alexandra Grey, Dominic Hoffman, and Sisi Aisha Johnson
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster Audio
Length:
Approximately 8 hours and 27 minutes
Source:
Review Copy from Simon & Schuster Audio.
Thank-you!
I
wanted to broaden my reading horizon, so I picked Slay to listen to in
February. I tend to read a lot of
historical fiction, while Slay is a contemporary novel about an African
American teenage girl, Kiera Johnson, who is the inventor and game runner of a
virtual reality game. I know nothing
about videogaming and am a rural white 41-year-old mother. I buckled up and was ready for a new story.
Kiera
Johnson has a hard time navigating life as one of the only African American
students at Jefferson Academy. She is constantly
questioned on what a black person feels on serios topics as if she represents
the entire race. Her boyfriend Malcom
and her sister want her to attend a historically black college, but she is not
sure what she really wants. Hidden from
her family and friends is her secret identify as the inventor and runner of the
virtual reality video game Slay. Slay is
a game for African Americans to celebrate black culture and awesomeness. After a player is killed outside the game by
another player, the world takes a hard look at Slay. Is the game racist? Should its creators be liable for murder?
It
took me a while to get into this audiobook, but once I got into the story, I
couldn’t stop listening to it. At the
heart, this is a coming of age story and about learning to accept
yourself. I think this would make a good
book club selection as it has excellent talking points about race,
relationships, and finding yourself.
The
book was primarily told through Kiera’s pint of view, but alternate chapters
had other player’s points of view and what the game meant to them in different
age brackets and cultures. I really
enjoyed the narratives and how the audiobook had different narrators for each
player.
The
reason I had a hard time getting into the novel at first was that I was annoyed
that Keira kept talking about being downtrodden as an upper middle class individual
that didn’t have to worry about paying for college and had a supportive
family She had a very different life as
a teenager than I did from an economic point of view and I find her complaints
to be rather whiny. But this ultimately
gave me another lens to view her story and racism.
Overall,
Slay was a gripping story of one girl’s ability to finally accept herself and celebrate
her own awesomeness while helping others to do the same around the world with
her virtual reality game. I really enjoyed
this audiobook.
A different genre for me too and this one sounds very interesting.
ReplyDeleteI love to dip into other genres at times and check them out. This was an interesting book!
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