YAAAAAAS

The wonderful thing about library books is there are so many possibilities. The bad thing about library books is there is so little time. A book is delivered to my Kindle and I have 3 weeks in which to read it. Library books take precedence over owned books, you see. Which is why it’s taken me over a year to finish Hidden Figures. There was just always a library book. Thank god for lulls because ugh this book is amazing.

And it is dense. I found it a little difficult to keep all the characters straight because there were so many badass black women doing so many badass things. I loved it. Loved every minute of it. It is a fascinating history of the space program told from a perspective our narrow-minded history books have robbed us of. We should all be livid we didn’t already know these stories, and we should all be grateful that Margo Lee Shetterly packaged them so beautifully.

I was so thoroughly invested in Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughn. I’d seen the movie so I knew most of the beats (Dorothy Vaughn was undersold in the movie, though, but they were focused on a specific time frame and she was most successful over a full career, not in snippets). These women were just so insanely brilliant and passionate and driven and un-fuck-with-able. They fought every obstacle the racist patriarchy threw and WON and sent John Glenn into space because of it.

And they looked good doing it (in part because they dressed as if for church every damn day because any less would be written off as “sloppy” by their white coworkers because black women have to work twice as hard to go half as far and it was bullshit then and it’s bullshit now)

Read this book.

Bingo Square: White Whale

Bingo #5 Underrepresented, White Whale, Two Heads Are Better Than One, Backlog, Cannonballer Says