BLACK GOLD by Augustine Sam
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Black Gold is literary fiction and follows the lives of two recent graduates. Femi is Nigerian by birth and has a top chemistry degree. Jessica is American and has a degree in economics. They fell in love whilst studying at their Italian university and married on graduation day.
Within a week of graduation, Femi has two top job offers. One is disguised as a research chemist for VenChemical, but Femi soon discovers they really want to make use of his Nigerian background. He is sent to bribe a top minister about a new oil partnership deal.
I think the author had a good set of plot ideas. I liked the trouble his interracial marriage caused when the couple met his parents and I liked the parts set in Italy; the author’s knowledge of the country made them believable. The author puts his poetic ability to good use and there are lots of examples of this in the descriptive sections.
I would have liked to see the main plotline further developed; everything felt rushed with little time spent making it plausible. It left me unconvinced that a multinational company would throw their money and support behind an inexperienced graduate with zero negotiating skills. I also yearned for more time spent developing both the main characters and the important minor ones; this would have given me a reason to be interested in their plight. We still know very little about Femi and Jessica by the end of the book.
Minor niggles came in the form of unnecessary dialogue tags and the odd instance of head-hopping which could easily be sorted with another draft or a better edit. Overall a good story concept, a little under-developed for a novel length, and with room to make the characters really jump off the page, perhaps by use of the poetic beauty elsewhere in the book.
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He has a first class degree in Chemistry. She has a first class degree in Economics. He is black. She is white. They are young and carefree and broke. When they land two spectacular job offers within the first week of graduation—with a free trip to New York to evaluate the first and a 30-day grace period to accept the other—their bleak honeymoon is transformed into a dream.
What they don’t know is that undisclosed details of the deal will pitch them against each other and entrap them in the place where dreams end and nightmares begin.
Will their interracial love survive the greed, the captivating allure of Black Gold, and that vile, ancient tradition that seeks to determine who should be married and to whom?
Augustine Sam is a journalist by profession, a novelist by choice, and a poet by chance. A bilingual writer and an award-winning poet, he writes not only hard news but literary works as well.
While pursuing hard news, he fell in love with poetry the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once. He was the winner of the Editors’ Choice Award in the North America Open Poetry Contest & a Finalist in the International Book Award Gala. His poems have been published in international anthologies, including “Measures of the Heart” & “Sounds of Silence.”
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Rosie Amber 
Reblogged this on anita dawes and jaye marie.
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Reblogged this on Author Don Massenzio and commented:
Check out this review of the book, Black Gold, by Augustine Sam, as featured on the Rosie Amber blog.
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