3.5 rounded up. From the title to the latent racism to the boiler room mentality of the “Sumwun” company, Askaripour builds a satirical commentary on climbing the corporate ladder.

I loved the first half of this book and it was occasionally quite funny but the second half felt like too much crazy in one story and the ending was pretty far-fetched.

I really couldn’t put this one down! Knocked it down a star because parts of it were a bit too fanciful, and it was hard to love the main character (he just made so many bad decisions), but a rush of a ride and a helluva commentary on the Black experience.

This was an interesting topic and I liked it. But he took a lot of mess from a lot of different people and created his own mess, which I am sure happens in real life but it just seemed to go pretty far.

Conflicted and honestly a little disappointed with this one. A high 2 if I'm being honest :( I wanted to love it based on premise alone. A satire based on the experiences of a person of color working at a tech startup instantly resonates with me! The plot makes for a fun read but I had lots of issues with the book overall.

Some disappointments:

- I found the voice fresh and very evocative of a young 20-something male making it in the world. But sometimes the language leaned too much into this immature, boyish tone. Descriptors like, "shrinking into a dark hole like a circumcised dick" or "spread faster than syphilis in the sixties" or "my throat was drier than a nun’s vagina." They were a little much...

- Reading this book sometimes felt like I was watching a cartoon. The characters were flat and almost trope-like (eg. the neighborhood elder who sits outside and gives advice to Buck or the girlfriend who he leaves and gets back together with at the end). The story centers so much on Buck's evolution, so we don't see much development from other characters. And there are a lottt of characters in this book. Unfortunately, this made for some dull dialogue.

- The first half of the story started off really strong but from the midpoint afterward, the story and pacing was all over the place. Some scenes felt like they were thrown in randomly just to move the plot forward.

- Didn't like that the book ended with a sales pitch encouraging the reader to buy the book for friends... felt weird.

What worked:

- Format. I enjoyed that it was a clever hybrid between a fictitious memoir and a sales manual. It added a lot of originality and voice to the story.

- The POV of a Black man navigating white-dominated spaces and all the racist jokes and microaggressions that come with that were often ridiculous but rooted in reality.

- Entertaining plot with a twist at the end

Black Buck is about a young man named Darren who has worked at Starbucks for four years. One day a man is ordering coffee and ends up giving Darren opportunity to work at a start up company that sells a vision. Darren wasn't initially interested but his mom and girlfriend convinced him to give it a try. Darren is one of three new hires, and the new hires have to go through hell week before they are able to be on their own. Darren is the only person of color in this entire office and he feels it. The rest of the book is his journey to becoming successful with some bumps along the way.

Although I liked this book, I was bothered by the author's use of talk about the female character's bodies. It just felt very unnecessary and kind of made me uncomfortable. Other than that, I enjoyed the satire in this book.

Thank you NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for allowing me to read this book for an honest review.

IDK. Maybe I went in with my expectations too high. I'd read a blurb that compared this book to [b:The Sellout|22237161|The Sellout|Paul Beatty|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403430899l/22237161._SX50_.jpg|41610676] (which I adore!) and was ready to fall in love with it.

But this book is no The Sellout. While the humor in that book felt easy and fresh, Black Buck felt like it was trying too hard to make jokes that stand-up comics have already made for decades. Every time some white dude compared Darren to a random Black celebrity I wanted to beat my head with my computer. This joke is so tired. Please let it rest. Similarly, the jokes about millennial corporate culture are also equally overdone. White CEOs in jeans and T-shirts. Pets in the office. Open office layout with glass walls. I don't even have a copy of the book on me to verify all this is mentioned; I just know. (I didn't enjoy the humor of this book, but the author's creation of Sumwun, the startup Darren goes to work for is perfect. The unnecessary service they provide, their marketing copy, the SPELLING! Amazing. I wish the rest of the humor was this on point. I would have loved it.)

Another issue is with the pacing. If you read the synopsis, this book is supposed to be about a young, unambitious barista who, after making it big in sales, works to pull others like him up the corporate ladder. And that does happen! But we don't even reach that plot point — arguably the main focus of the novel — until the 60 percent mark. As a result, the final third of the book goes at a break-neck pace as it rushes to tie everything together. I don't want to spoil, but things go off the wall. I would have enjoyed this book and its ridiculous twists so much more had it allowed these things to develop and occur more thoroughly.

Despite all these issues, there were things I liked about this book. Yes, it's very heavy handed with its message, but it's a message that's worth slapping people in the face with. I liked the characters, specifically Jason and the Happy Campers. (Darren himself I can pass on. He's bland, tbh, and kind of a jackass, even when he's supposed to be repentant.)

A good debut that I would have enjoyed more had I not gone into it expecting Paul Beatty's wit.

There's some good stuff here including a main character with a lot of confidence. The beginning is pretty punchy and I was excited when Buck got a job interview through his powers of persuasion on a coffee order. From there, I felt like things lost steam. There was a lot of action, but I didn't feel in it. I was pleased to keep reading, but I didn't feel the connection to the characters much any more. I liked the story arc and how things wrapped up, but other than one twist, I never got as excited as I did in the early chapters.

So much cringe… Honestly did put this book down within 30 seconds to make sure it wasn’t written by a white man with an MBA, because that is the vibe. I put it down another two times, because I couldn’t stand the turn of events and nonesense that transpired.

I did appreciate how it wrapped up and the unique plot. Also thought it did a good job really exposing what the tech industry has alway been being amplified through the start up world. But, wow the way I did not want to finish this book, I just thought it would get better, and it never came.