Read for Barnes and Noble YA Book Club July meeting
Ace of Spades is a young adult contemporary thriller with a plot centering around both dark academia and social justice.
Chiamaka is a wealthy and popular student at Niveus (an mostly white prep school) and works hard to maintain both. She is biracial (Italian/Nigerian) and in love with her best friend Jaime.
Devon is a black scholarship student and a talented musician from the “wrong side of the tracks”. He mostly flies under the radar at school and all of his friends (and his boyfriend) are from his neighborhood.
These two students seemingly have nothing in common (except for their color) when a mysterious campaign of harassment called “the Aces” singles them both out and reveals their darkest secrets through a series of texts and propaganda. Both are scrambling both separately and eventually together to figure out why they were chosen and who “Aces” really is. Their investigation will lead them down a road paved with racism, wealth and privilege.
Ace of Spades is a twisty thriller with a lot of food for thought about prep school culture and institutionalized racism. There were a few struggles I had with the personalities of both characters which made it hard to get behind them. Chiamaka is so invested in her Queen Bee personality that she immediately unlikable such as purposely calling younger girls by the wrong name, transactional and superficial friendships and just a general snotty attitude. Devon should be the one we root for but he and his boyfriend are the neighborhood drug dealers and it’s hard to feel bad for him when Ace brings that fact to light. He’s also a giant cry baby. He cries A LOT. I also found it unbelievable that a student as wealthy as Chiamaka wouldn’t reach out to her parents and any connections they had in the black community for help and support during her investigation of the Aces.
Overall this is a fast paced thriller and I had a lot of theories (some panned out and some didn’t) but I wish I could root for the two main characters more. The epilogue also felt tacked on and a little corny.
3.5 stars