I was beyond excited to read this book when I first heard about it, but when I found out there's a movie version coming out in January...well, is it too cheesy to say my interest rocketed into outer space?

Seriously, watch this trailer and tell me it doesn't get you all kinds of excited!

Margot Lee Shetterly has done fabulous work unearthing the stories of the African-American women engineers and mathematicians who played pivotal roles at NASA from World War II on through the space race of the 1960s. I hope tons of girls and women read her book and see the movie and feel empowered to pursue STEM careers. Time to shatter that glass ceiling once and for all!

One bummer for me in listening to Hidden Figures, unfortunately, was how difficult it turned out to be to follow in audio. Shetterly tells the stories of several different women in an overlapping and not always perfectly chronological way. There aren't many signposts in the audio version to keep you on track as far as who is who. This is one case where I think I would have gotten more out of a print version, where I could lock in visually on chapter titles and character names. It's really too bad the narrative was so intricate, because Robin Miles (who also read the audio version of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration and totally killed it) is a wonderful reader, and I wish I could recommend the audio version based on her skillful narration alone.

Even though my particular reading experience wasn't everything it could have been, I still love that these women's stories are finally being told, and you can bet I'll be lining up to see the movie in January!

More book recommendations by me at www.readingwithhippos.com