Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour

Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour – Audio

Book Blurb:

An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.
After enduring a “hell week” of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as “Buck,” a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he’s hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.

My Review: 3.5 stars

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Black Buck gets ten stars for title and cover art in relation to the book. This is one of those books that screams read me! I also really enjoyed the narrator…he had great sass, cadence and expression. Well done!

I was sucked into Darren’s story from the start and found him to be a likable character. It’s said that your life can change in a minute, and for Darren, it certainly did. From the blurb alone, I thought I knew how this book would play out – and I did for the most part. However, I was not expecting the biting satire on corporate America and open workplace racism. Somehow, the author managed to add a sense of odd hilarity to Darren’s situation. 

I kept thinking about Darren’s relationships with his girlfriend, his mother and old friends from Starbucks and the significance they played in his life until he morphed into someone else entirely. How now, while writing this playbook/memoir type story, he must wonder if any of it was worth it. The reflection on his choices had to be glaring back at him by the end of the book. I think there was just too many buzzworthy topics put into this short book and that it started to feel like a gimmick. I’d still highly recommend it though. This would be a great discussion book. 

Quotes I liked:

An opportunity means change. An opportunity means action. But most of all, an opportunity means the chance of failure. And it’s the potential for failure, more than failure itself, that stops so many people from beginning anything.” 

“It’s the duty of every man and woman who has achieved some success in life to pass it on, because when we’re gone, what matters most isn’t what we were able to attain but who we were able to help.”