SLAY Audiobook (Free)

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019!

“Gripping and timely.” —People

“The YA debut we’re most thrilled for this yr.” —Entertainment Regular

“A book that knocks you off your foot while dropping the type of understanding that’ll maintain you down for the count number. Prepare to become slain.” —Nic Rock, New York Times bestselling writer of Dear Martin and Odd One Out

Ready Player One fits The Hate U Give in this dynamite debut novel that follows a brutal teen game developer as she battles a real-life troll approximately SLAY intent on ruining the Dark Panther–inspired gaming she created as well as the safe community it represents for Black gamers.

By time, seventeen-year-old Kiera Johnson is an honors college student, a math tutor, and one of the only Black children at Jefferson Academy. But in the home, she joins thousands of Black gamers who duel world-wide as Nubian personas in the trick multiplayer online role-playing card video game, SLAY. No-one knows Kiera is the game developer, not really her close friends, her family, not her sweetheart, Malcolm, who is convinced video games are partially responsible for the “downfall of the Dark man.”

But when a teenager in Kansas City is murdered over a dispute in the SLAY globe, news of the overall game reaches mainstream media, and SLAY is labeled a racist, exclusionist, violent hub for thugs and bad guys. Even worse, an anonymous troll infiltrates the game, intimidating to sue Kiera for “anti-white discrimination.”

Driven to save the just world where she can be herself, Kiera must conserve her key identity and funnel what this means to be unapologetically Dark in a global intimidated by Blackness. But can she protect her game without shedding herself along the way?