I really wanted to like this book. I had heard so many good things and of course the story itself is one that needs to be told and told again, but the writing was simply not my style. First, let’s start with the good things about Hidden Figures and then I’ll talk about the reasons you might want to watch the movie instead.

Hidden Figures tells the stories of three women of color who work as human computers in the aviation department at Langley during WWII and then at NASA during the space race. These women were just a few of the hundreds and hundreds of women (both white and black) who formed the backbone of all the technical engineering needed to fly a plane and launch a rocket. When the computers we know today did not exist, all calculations were done by these incredibly smart and capable women. The reason I like this book is because it reveals a story that is hardly, if ever, told to the public. It breaks down gender and race barriers in a time when segregation was still the norm and it is truly uplifting to read about women who were both geniuses and capable, loving mothers.

With all the good things this book does for women and people of color, Margot Lee Shetterly was not the right person to write it. For the first third of the book, I kept thinking: “When is the story going to start?” Everything I read was background. It was all told from an omniscient narrator and continually jumped from one character to another and forward and backward in time in a way that was not only confusing but left me unable to connect with any of the characters. As writers, we know that background is important to the story, but shouldn’t be the focal point. This book is ALL background. I expected to at some point get through the background and come to the part where Shetterly throws something interesting at the characters to get the story started, but that never happened. I couldn’t tell one character from another and found myself halfway through the book before I realized Shetterly thought she was telling a story, but had buried it so deeply in background, that I couldn’t see the difference. There was no hook, no inciting incident, no obstacles, no antihero, no heroines for that matter, no climax, no story. It was simply a retelling of historical facts. On top of the poor storytelling, Shetterly writes like a thesaurus. Her sentences are often so flowery and filled with unnecessary descriptors straight out of a dictionary, it makes discovering the story beneath all that dirt even more impossible. The reader has the tendency to get lost in the side roads and forget altogether who’s story we are meant to be following, where and when they are in time, etc.

TLDR: This book was a struggle for me. I recommend the movie instead.

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Created Aug 03, 2019 at 8:36am • Submit your own review...