For fans of Sorry to Bother You and The Wolf of Wall Street—a crackling, satirical debut novel about a young man given a shot at stardom as the lone Black salesman at a mysterious, cult-like, and wildly successful startup where nothing is as it seems.
There’s nothing like a Black salesman on a mission.
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.
Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America’s workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.
REVIEW: Thank you NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the ARC of this book in exchange for a review.
I have some really mixed feelings about this book. First I would like to say that I have never really worked in corporate America. I have mainly worked in retail and more recently in education. I have also never lived in or even been to New York City or any other big cities others than Houston, TX which is a very diverse place. If this is the way corporate America really is then that just makes me really sad. In this book Darren is a good kid who, while he may not have it all figured out, he does love his family, his girlfriend, his neighbors, and really has a sense of who he is as a human. He has a good heart and his family comes first. On a whim he is given a major opportunity at a really sketchy sales agency and is subjected to some of the most horrific things during his "hell week" at the company. Since he is the only POC who works for the company most of these incidents are race related. After hell week there is a tragic turn of events that boosts Darren AKA Buck at this point into a major career and from here he completely forgets who he is. I understand that some people change when they start making the big bucks but his change in character was really tough to read about and there were a lot of things said to the people who matter most in his life and he ends up pushing them away and becoming closer with these horrible people that he works with that may not have done these things to him but have all stood by and done and said nothing. The things he starts doing really are just not in his character. At this point things take another turn and just completely go off the rails. This book just got crazier and crazier with every turn of the page. I would have to rate this book a 2 out of 5 given that I definitely couldn't stop reading.
Publication Date: January 5, 2021
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