Ace of Spades has promise but its bleakness stunts the plot

Ace of Spades by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé is an ambitious YA thriller that blends the teen drama elements of Gossip Girl and the horrific social commentary of Get Out. Readers are introduced to Niveus Academy on the first day of school as these well-to-do students enter their senior year.

Chiamaka Adebayo is a wealthy queen of mean, whose high-achieving, social-climbing ways are her ticket to Yale and into the life of being a somebody on a national scale not just in the rich, white halls of the academy.

Devon Richards, in contrast, is a scholarship kid from an underserved community who’s just trying to get through high school, get accepted into Julliard, and provide his family with a better life.

However, the mysterious Aces is not only hellbent on disrupting their plans, they also want to ruin their lives.

Ace of Spades is a promising thriller but it’s bleak and tries to do too much

With exception to the romance in Ace of Spades linked to explorations of identity, self-acceptance, and a firm stance on self-worth, there is a disparity of joy in this book.

Àbíké-Íyímídé spends a lot of time unpacking issues of assimilation, homophobia, and poverty creating an insufferable environment with very little light pouring in. Her narrative isn’t a powder keg, it’s a simmering fire growing hotter as Aces throws more and more kindling onto the blaze.

Presumably, the multiple romances weaved in and out of the plot are meant to provide some kind of buffer between the abject suffering Devon endures on a daily basis and Chiamaka’s slow realization that the facade she built is crumbling to pieces. However, it doesn’t quite work.

Every one of Devon’s secrets Aces exposes is something that actually happened to him. Whether it’s a previous relationship, an intimate moment, or his current boyfriend. Chiamaka’s are all manufactured and meant to weigh on her mental health and sanity. There’s no balance between these leads just a lot of Black pain.

Àbíké-Íyímídé threw everything into Ace of Spades. Devon is carrying the weight of being a young gay Black teen living in a poor community that’s rife with drugs, violence, single parents, and incarcerated family members. He’s not out to his mom who works three jobs to put him through school while raising her three boys from different fathers.

He has an emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend who kept him a secret. His current boyfriend is one of his best friends and also runs a ring of dealers to make ends meet. He has a homophobic former friend. As well as a love interest from his past who he wants to trust but is suspicious of because of everything going on. Also, Devon’s father is in jail. It’s a lot.

In comparison, Chiamaka doesn’t have as much going on but it’s still a lot to work through. There’s her conniving crew of friends who only hang out for appearances. Her non-romance with her best friend Jamie has very unsettling implications in it from an accident that happened in their Junior year to a drunken night before school started.

She’s a brown-skinned mixed girl of Nigerian and Italian descent who’s ostracized from her father’s family because of their racism. Chiamaka has constructed an image of herself to fit in, but she’s hiding an immense amount of trauma. She’s also learning more about her sexuality as she begins to fall for a girl she shouldn’t.

Large swathes of Ace of Spades are spent on unpacking all of this to the point that it takes a considerable amount of time for Devon and Chiamaka to interact let alone team up against Aces. What keeps the story chugging forward is the strength of Àbíké-Íyímídé’s voice.

In spite of what often feels like yet another tragic piece added to an already devastating puzzle, Àbíké-Íyímídé’s deft ability in fleshing out these characters compels the reader to become invested. Yes, there are twists and turns in this book that will have you flipping the pages anxiously, but they hold up past the initial adrenaline rush because of her work on developing Devon and Chiamaka.

I just wish that Ace of Spades wasn’t bogged down by so many relevant conversations happening at once. The book essentially is a discourse on the pervasiveness of whiteness, even in marginalized communities, as a corrosive element within institutions and society as a whole. But it also wants to be part contemporary romance along with being a thriller, and the two leads as a pair get lost in it.

There’s just no room for satisfactory development of their begrudging friendship which is meant to be founded on their desire to stop Aces. But, honestly, things just keep happening to these two as events spiral more and more out of control.

Ace of Spades needed more joy, fight, and anger. It’s there in flashes only to be smothered again before coming back. Sure, there’s an argument to be made that such is life for Black people caught in a system not built for them and stacked against their favor. But, we keep having this conversation in media and the preoccupation with Black suffering is becoming too much when Black triumph is often delayed.

This is not to say that the work Àbíké-Íyímídé does in her debut doesn’t bring something new and fresh to the YA book world. It does. Chiamaka and Devon are two Black queer leads fighting to stay afloat in a racist system.

Ace of Spades is topical while being accessible. Teens are likely to eat this book up with a spoon; it’s dramatic and heartfelt. The blossoming romances are so lovely and soft (if you ignore the twists). There is exceptional care given to the interiority of these two kids, their emotions, and their decision-making.

But when the premise of the book falls on the shoulders of the only two Black students in an all-white academy and they have few substantial relationships with other Black folks in their lives that aren’t under attack or threatened in some way, it creates a story that decenters Blackness as a positive.

The ending of Ace of Spades can’t fix that because the majority of the book is spent on Black erasure. It’s still a story that centers on whiteness even as it attempts to deconstruct it and showcase its toxic effects not only on these two kids but also on their white counterparts.

Giving Chiamaka and Devon more time to develop as characters together could have helped change this. But, unfortunately, their parts working to stop Aces feel more incidental than inevitable, which is a shame because it’s an opportunity for them both to find support and friendship in each other. While they do form a bond, there’s nothing about it that feels organic or like it was given the same attention as other relationships.

Despite this, however, Àbíké-Íyímídé is a new exciting voice in YA expressly because she’s pushing at boundaries, engaging in uncomfortable realities, and forcing a conversation with her work. No matter how you feel about Ace of Spades, it provokes a reaction and a need to talk about the various issues brought up and explored in the book.