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