Slave Day
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- £1.99
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- £1.99
Publisher Description
From the creator of Veronica Mars comes a timely novel that looks at a high school fundraising tradition of auctioning off students as “slaves.”
At Robert E. Lee High School, the traditional fundraising event is Slave Day, in which the student leaders and faculty are auctioned off as slaves for the winning bidders. Keene Davenport is outraged and plans to stay home to protest this racist practice. But his mom won’t let him skip school, and he finds that none of his classmates took his protest seriously. So instead he decides on an alternative path of civil disobedience—he will “buy” Shawn Greeley, the school’s first black student body president.
Told in eight alternating perspectives, Slave Day is a powerful novel featuring beauty queens, geeks, class clowns, and football players—and none of them will come out of it the same.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thomas's ambitious if not wholly successful second novel deals with all the complex issues (love, sex, friendship and the meaning of it all) visited in his promising Rats Saw God. The setting here is a Texas high school during "Slave Day," when student council members and teachers are auctioned off, becoming slaves for the highest bidders. Offended by the racist premise of this apparently cherished school tradition, a mild-mannered senior calls for a walkout by his fellow African American students, but, at his mother's insistence, he is forced to attend-and decides that buying the first black student council president might be more effective anyway. Others have their own concerns: a nerdy student council member frets that no one will "buy" him; an unpopular teacher worries that a surly student has purchased him for revenge; a dance team member wonders why her boyfriend's best friend has bid on her. These characters are among the eight narrators whose interwoven first-person accounts of Slave Day form the novel. Various subplots ask readers to consider ethical questions (a teacher wrongly accuses a student of cheating; a student is, less probably, asked to tamper with financial documents via computer). Under the weight of so many characters and issues, and limited to a narrow perspective (a 12-hour day), the pacing is frequently sluggish and the examination of race relations isn't always hard-hitting. On the other hand, Thomas is so good at capturing teen language and responses that the book will be welcomed by readers looking for a reflection of their own struggles. Ages 12-up.
