Review: Slay

And just like that…I’m back. My dissertation is finished, and I’m furiously overjoyed about it. I’ll upload a nice pic of me in my cap and gown for ya’ll in a few weeks. December 12 is my official graduation date. Yay me!!!

Anyway I’m chock full of reviews. Forgive me as I unload them upon you over the next few weeks…

Review for "Slay" by Brittney Morris (2019)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

When I first heard of this book being about Black girl gamers, I had to have it. It was on my TBR pile long before it was published, so my expectations were pretty high. It’s rare that a book deals with Black adolescent girls in certain intellectual contexts, even rarer for that focus to be on the world of gaming, which is, whether we like it or not, still a very strongly White male dominated culture.

Anyway, SLAY is a book that celebrates Blackness. No, really, it does. In addition to the storyline, I was pleased to find recent references from Black popular culture memes and such. At the center of the novel is Kiera, a teenage girl growing up in Seattle who is one of the few students of color at her high school. Although she is surrounded by friends and a caring boyfriend, she feels like an outsider. To pass the time, Kiera created SLAY, an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) for people of color to come together, collect cards, and battle for points. Black gamers come together from all over the world to play SLAY to be proud of their identities and to find a refuge against the racism that’s prevalent in the gaming world.

No one knows that Kiera is the creator of SLAY. She keeps her creation a secret from family and friends and her boyfriend Malcolm, who feels like games are a distraction and tool of the “evil White man.” All goes well until a gamer is killed as a result of a conflict related to SLAY. Suddenly SLAY is all over the news and branded as racist. Even worse, a troll with bad intentions begins to stalk Kiera online.

Overall, I had a lot of fun reading this book. There are some deep, intra-racial issues discussed here that I liked, such as what makes an authentic “Black” experience, the need for safe spaces, the ubiquity of Anglo and mainstream ideals. It’s interesting that so many games out there are based on systems of belief and characters that are Eurocentric in nature (wizards, castles, elves, and so on) and no one questions the ubiquity of it. Even sadder still are the experiences of harassment and racism by Black gamers in these White-dominated online spaces. Yet when a Black girl gamer goes to create a game based on Afro-centric standpoint, she is vilified.

The only complaint I have is that most of the side characters were a bit one-dimensional. There are also some other POVs of SLAY gamers sprinkled in at certain places that I would have personally left out. It’s forgivable though, I won’t dwell on it. This is a great book, a must read!