On the Come Up: Women Who Slay

Angie Thomas made her debut with the #1 New York Times bestselling, award-winning novel The Hate U Give. A former teen rapper, she holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Belhaven University. Angie Thomas‘ On the Come Up (Balzer + Bray) follows sixteen-year-old Bri, a talented rapper and knowledgeable hip hop fan who is best known as the daughter of the underground hip hop legend Lawless, who was murdered right before he hit big by local gang members. Her mother insists that she focus on preparing for college, but Bri finally has a shot to make it big with her music. Her first recorded song goes viral for all the wrong reasons. The verses, fueled by her anger over being profiled by security guards at school, earn her a reputation she didn’t want. In fact, she soon finds herself at the center of a controversy, portrayed by the media as more menace than MC. But with an eviction notice staring her family down, Bri doesn’t just want to make it—she has to. Playing into the stereotype to make money could be her ticket out of poverty, but Bri must decide who she really is and how to represent herself and her skills. On the Come Up is the story of fighting for your dreams, even as the odds are stacked against you; and about how, especially for young black people, freedom of speech isn’t always free. In a starred review Kirkus Reviews said that “This honest and unflinching story of toil, tears, and triumph is a musical love letter that proves literary lightning does indeed strike twice. The rawness of Bri’s narrative demonstrates Thomas’ undeniable storytelling prowess. A joyous experience awaits.”

Brittney Morris is the founder and former president of the Boston University Creative Writing Club, and her work has been published in The Boston University Chimaerid Literary Magazine. She holds a BA in economics. Slay (Simon Pulse), her dynamite debut novel, follows a fierce teen game developer as she battles a real-life troll intent on ruining the Black Panther-inspired video game she created and the safe community it represents for Black gamers. 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?