A Publishers Weekly Best Publication of 2019!

“Gripping and well-timed.” —People

“The YA debut we’re most excited for this season.” —Entertainment Regular

“A publication that knocks you off your ft while dropping the kind of knowledge that’ll keep you down for the count number. Prepare to become slain.” —Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin and Odd One Out

Ready Participant One meets The Hate U Give in this dynamite debut novel that follows a brutal teenage game developer as she battles a real-life troll approximately SLAY intent about ruining the Black Panther–inspired video game she created and the safe community it represents for Dark gamers.

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

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

Driven to save the just world where she can be herself, Kiera must preserve her key identity and funnel what it means to be unapologetically Black in a global intimidated by Blackness. But can she shield her video game without losing herself along the way?