Slay by Brittney Morris

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.