A review by araeofbooks
Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour

challenging dark emotional funny mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

 “I realized it was freedom that had motivated me from the very beginning. Not money, power, the need to prove myself, or even to make Ma proud, but the freedom to breathe where I want, when I want, how I want, and with whom I want in my beautiful brown skin.”

I finished this book a few days ago and honestly, I’m still thinking about and processing this book. It’s fiction, but it’s written as part memoir of our protagonist Darren and part self-help/sales how-to. I’ve never read anything quite like it. Darren is kind of stuck in his life. At 22, he forewent college and is working at Starbucks. He engages with the CEO of a tech start-up in the coffee shop, accidentally getting himself an opportunity as a saleman in this vague new company. The first part of this book felt to me like a satire about majority white, fraternity bro start-up culture. Darren is the only person of color in this workspace and there’s this running motif in which Darren’s new colleagues are constantly telling him he looks like a famous Black person and never the same famous Black person (he gets everything from Malcom X to Morgan Freeman). We see Darren get sucked into the cult-like mentality of this tech start-up.

This part of the book was really engrossing and uncomfortable (in a good way!) as a white reader. There are so many things I don’t necessarily think about the spaces I exist in, because I am very often in the majority, that this book really made me think long and hard about. That’s what I want in most of the books I read.

There was a dramatic turn in this book where it becomes something else -- still what I felt like was a satire about race and the way we talk about and view it, but at the beginning of this turn even our narrator Darren admits that the turn is “half absurd, half jaw-dropping, and a whole heaping of crazy.” I don’t know what I feel about this half of the book. It definitely felt absurd, but I appreciated that the narrator is like, yes, you are not crazy for feeling this way. This is intentional. This book was darkly funny, engrossing, and cringe-worthy, and I’m excited to see what Mateo Askaripour writes next.


 
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