SLAY is such a powerful book. It’s about a teenage girl Kiera who develops an online game that celebrates Black culture and becomes a safe space for Black gamers around the world. Until a teen gets killed over the game. SLAY hits mainstream media, and is immediately labeled a racist, violent, exclusionary space for thugs and gang members. And an anonymous troll infiltrates the game and threatens to sue Kiera for discrimination.

I love Kiera and her co-developer and game moderator Cicada. I love that the Black culture references within Slay are international and not just American (e.g. Fufu – look it up). I love that the game is played by such a broad diversity of people from around the world (e.g. Cicada is French). I love how the author gives some of these players a chapter of their own to really show the incredibly varied impacts this game had on their lives (e.g. a trans teen still in the closet, a man in Hong Kong constantly being asked for selfies, the children of a political commentator).

I also love that within Kiera’s family and friends, the author shows a broad range of experiences with Black culture, from Kiera’s super political sister, to Kiera’s boyfriend with his super rigid views on being the “right” kind of Black person, to Kiera’s well-meaning but at-times cringey best friend (who asks Kiera if she’s allowed as a white person to get dreadlocks), to the best friend’s definitely cringey and feeling-woke-but-really-racist brother (who straight up harasses Kiera for her opinion on the dreadlocks question).

The book tackles some heavy issues (e.g. a boy is killed over the game, Kiera and her sister Steph have a conversation about police brutality), but the overall feel is one of hope and joy. Partly that’s because Kiera, Cicada and Steph are just incredibly kickass young women. And partly because each scene that takes us into the world of the game Slay is a straight-up celebration of Black culture. There’s an almost overwhelming joy in how the players approach the game, and in how they inhabit the space that Slay provides, that this feeling positively spills over from the page. So when a troll infiltrates the game and threatens everything Kiera and Cicada have worked so hard to built, I found myself furious at the possibility, and cheering with all my heart for the troll to be vanquished. No spoilers, but there’s a scene when players from around the world all shared a bit of their reality within the virtual world of the game, and it just pulled hard at my heartstrings.

There’s a section where Kiera reflects on how all the references to Black experiences within the game Slay (e.g. a card called “McDonald’s money”) won’t mean as much to non-Black people. They may learn the abilities / powers of each game card, but the nuance and significance of what the cards represent will be over their heads. I get that. And all I can say is, this book was incredibly powerful to me, an Asian-Canadian woman.

I can only imagine how much more this book will resonate with Black readers, and especially teen girls who can see themselves in Kiera’s shoes.

Read it.

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Thanks to Simon and Schuster Canada for an e-galley in exchange for an honest review.

Just when I thought I’ve already read any YA dystopia formula there could ever be, comes a book that just blows me away. The Grace Year is Handmaid’s Tale meets Hunger Games meets Mean Girls with a touch of Twilight, and it all comes together in a breathtaking way.

I love the touch of mysticism mixed in with hard reality. And I especially love the little touches of impending rebellion, signified by a flower, that lead to a wonderfully thrilling reveal about the usurper’s identity, and to an absolutely heartwarming revelation at the end. While most YA dystopias focus on the revolution, The Grace Year explores how the seeds for revolution are planted in the first place, and is all the stronger and more powerful for it.

The novel is about a tomboy named Tierney, who just turned 16 and is about to enter her grace year. Along with other 16 year old girls in her village, Tierney is off to live in the woods for a year, in order to ‘purify’ herself of all the magical powers in her system. The girls who return from their grace year are haunted by their experience, and some girls never return at all. And before they leave, the boys and men in their village decide each girl’s fate when they return — some will be selected for marriage, and the remainder will spend the rest of their lives doing hard labour.

The social commentary in this novel is not at all subtle, but I love how Liggett manages to weave in fairy tale elements with some horrific and downright criminal explanations. The girls are clearly victim to the larger forces of the society they live in, yet when separated from their home, some of them turn on others with the ferocity of people who know all too well how fleeting this taste of power will be. It’s both cruel and tragic, and even though queen bee mean girl Kiersten definitely goes far over the line in her quest for dominance, I still found myself feeling for her as the story unfolds.

Probably my favourite part of this book were the glimpses we got into the outskirts, where girls have been banished and a somewhat impoverished but free community has developed. I love how the rebel leader’s identity was revealed, and how it tied into the entire story overall.

There’s an unlikely romance as well, between Tierney and a hunter named Ryker. It was a Twilight-like predator and prey pairing that was sweet in some ways but also didn’t fully sit right with me. Partly, it’s because I prefer Michael, Tierney’s best friend who’s waiting for her back in the village, and by the end of the book, he does something that made me love him even more. But also partly because while the novel provides context for Ryker’s situation in a way that somehow makes us understand why he and others like him are hunting girls in their grace year, what the hunters do to the girls is just disturbing, and whatever Ryker’s situation, I couldn’t quite cheer him on. So I’m not sure how I feel about how this particular subplot turns out, but I do like how things are all tied together in the end.

Overall, The Grace Year is a thrilling and feminist dystopian. Its social commentary is fairly obvious, but its form of rebellion is surprisingly subtle. It ends not with a happy resolution, but rather with the promise of one, and one that won’t come till long after the story ends. Paradoxically, this offers an ending that in today’s world feels both more realistic and more hopeful at the same time. It acknowledges that evil doesn’t always live in particular despots, but rather in social systems that will take generations to overturn. And even if we don’t get to witness this overturning ourselves, we can at least be assured that it will come someday, and that we played a small but integral part in making it happen.

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Thank you to Raincoast Books for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Daughter’s Tale is a family saga about the trauma of living through a war and the lengths to which women must go in order to protect their daughters. In 1939 Berlin, Amanda Sternberg must make a difficult choice to save her two daughters from the Nazis. And in 2015 New York, one of Amanda’s daughters, Elise Duval, had been living under an assumed identity for decades until someone comes to bring her letters written by her mother during the war.

It’s a sad story, made even sadder by the fact that it’s based on true events. Correa does a good job in detailing the harsh realities that war imposes on families, and the terrible sacrifices people must sometimes make so that they or their loved ones can survive. Amanda and her family are Jewish, and when Amanda escapes to the south of France to stay with a Catholic family friend, it was particularly difficult to see the casual racism from children, and think of how deeply hatred can be absorbed at such a young age.

One thing I really struggled with — and that took me out of the latter half of the book — is the decision Amanda makes at the dock of the boat to Cuba. She is confronted with a difficult, maybe even an impossible, choice, and she does what her gut tells her to do. I’m in no position to judge her for her choice, nor even to know how I would have acted in her place, but I kept thinking she made the wrong one. Especially later on when things go south, I kept feeling that the decision she made was selfish, and put her daughter in unnecessary danger, but I also acknowledge that it’s much easier for me to say that while reading their story in the comfort of my home. The reality is there’s no way to know for sure what the right choice for yourself and for your family would be in such a situation, and it’s to Correa’s credit that he lets his heroine make such a morally ambiguous decision.

Ultimately, the book was simply too depressing for me, and I found the pace too slow, but I think that’s more a matter of personal preference. Many fans of historical fiction, especially those who enjoy novels about World War II, will likely enjoy and be moved by this story. It’s an emotional, intimate glimpse into the experiences of a single family, and it shows how far into the future the experiences of war extend.

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.