By Margot Lee Shetterly, Winifred Conkling
The picture-book true story of four Black women mathematicians whose calculations helped send Americans into space.
It introduces Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, four Black women who were brilliant at math at a time when both their color and being women were used to keep them down. They go to work for NASA and its predecessor, doing the calculations that helped planes fly and astronauts reach space, even as they're made to use separate offices and bathrooms. Laura Freeman's warm, glowing pictures carry a lot of real history in a short, readable span, ending on the launches their math made possible.
It rolls four inspiring lives into one clear arc, which is efficient for a unit, and it links two big ideas a class is often studying at once, the space race and the fight for equal treatment. It's honest that segregation and sexism stood in these women's way, but the tone is one of triumph and brilliance, not defeat. And it makes math heroic, which is a rare and useful thing to hand a child.