Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly should just be a glowing ball of jaw dropping greatness heavily slathered in awesome sauce. Something Marsellus Wallace would keep locked up in a secure briefcase. The subject: black female mathematician’s hidden but tremendously influential impact on the United States aeronautic superiority during the second World War as well as helping win the Space Race seems compelling, important, exciting, and timely. The book is historical so I can feel like a responsible grown up for reading something other than fiction, it’s about minorities so I can pat myself on the back (what a great job this white man has done broadening his horizons by reading about some diversity), also, this book will soon become a movie so I can also feel trendy having read something you will all be seeing in the theaters next summer.

In other words, Hidden Figures has so much going for it that it should be an incredible grand-slam homerun of a book. Yet it ultimately ends up disappointing. It’s the t-shirt gun of books. Should be awesome, but as you sit there afterwards with only a wrinkled t-shirt in your hands you can’t help but wonder, “is that all there is to it?

Alas, something seems lacking. The writing is dry and uninvolving. Shetterly has the alarming talent for making a somewhat slender 265 pages feel like 2,650,000 pages (a talent employed by the folks who make high school clocks hanging in last-period classrooms everyday). For every interesting vignette –Mary Jackson using the skills from her engineering aeronautic job to help her son make a winning soap box derby car; or the backstory of Dorothy Vaughan leaving her young children and husband for months (“I’ll be back a Christmas”) to work in the foreign and possibly hostile predominately white environment of the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory; there are several spiritless chapters of textbook caliber prose to drudge through. Maybe it’s the fact that these brave and very smart women are never portrayed as less then super heroic—they seem to effortlessly glide through their everyday encounters of prejudice and discrimination with grace, perfection and little drama. They’re not relatable. Maybe it’s the fact that the job of being a NASA computer as these women were is hard to describe and contains little conflict. Maybe, it is just the fact that the story of every important historical figure does not make riveting reading.

While Hidden Figures was interesting as a subject matter and it does make me want to learn more math, the book did not come across as anything special.