Welcome to my Indigo Teen Staff Pick of the Month blog post for October 2019! If you’ve been following my Instagram account, you might have noticed that I’ve been posting about the Indigo Teen Staff Picks since November 2017. I started talking about these picks in January 2018, and have enjoyed discussing them with you all! Keep reading to see which book is this month’s Indigo Teen Staff Pick!

For those hearing about Indigo Teen Staff Pick of the Month for the first time, it’s a program run by Chapters/Indigo Books & Music Inc. in which 100 staff members read a number of teen and YA books and then vote for their pick of the month! Each monthly pick is announced by Chapters/Indigo at the beginning of each month, and each of the picks are kept secret until then! Isn’t that exciting? Please be sure to use #IndigoStaffPicks if you share anything about this on social media, or if you want to show off your own copy of a Teen Staff Picks book (in connection to this)!

⤖ This Month’s Pick ⬻

SLAY by Brittany Morris

You can read the synopsis below, and get your own copy
at a reduced price on the Chapters / Indigo website this month!

⤖ About the Book ⬻

Title: SLAY
Author: Brittney Morris
Type: Fiction
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Publisher: Simon Pulse
(Simon & Schuster)
Date published: September 24, 2019

By day, seventeen-year-old Kiera Johnson is an honors student, a math tutor, and one of the only Black kids at Jefferson Academy. But at home, she joins hundreds of thousands of Black gamers who duel worldwide as Nubian personas in the secret multiplayer online role-playing card game, SLAY. No one knows Kiera is the game developer, not her friends, her family, not even her boyfriend, Malcolm, who believes video games are partially responsible for the “downfall of the Black man.”

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

Driven to save the only world in which she can be herself, Kiera must preserve her secret identity and harness what it means to be unapologetically Black in a world intimidated by Blackness. But can she protect her game without losing herself in the process?

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⤖ About the Author ⬻

Brittney Morris is the author of SLAY. She holds a BA in Economics from Boston University because back then, she wanted to be a financial analyst. (She’s now thankful that didn’t happen). She spends her spare time reading, playing indie video games, and enjoying the Seattle rain from her apartment. She lives with her husband Steven who would rather enjoy the rain from a campsite in the woods because he hasn’t played enough horror games. Brittney is the founder and former president of the Boston University Creative Writing Club, a four-time NaNoWriMo winner and a 2018 Pitch Wars mentor.

⤖ Let’s Chat! ⬻

THANKS SO MUCH FOR READING MY INDIGO TEEN STAFF PICK OF THE MONTH POST! HAVE YOU READ THIS BOOK? AND IF SO, WHAT DID YOU THINK? OR IS IT ON YOUR TBR? LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS!