I absolutely love learning more about Katherine Johnson, so I was super excited to pick up the new Young Katherine Johnson book. This tells some stories about her growing up in the form of comic strips. A lot of funny ones but some series ones too about the racism she and her family had to deal with. I thought this was a fun approach to teach some good lessons and some history as well, both of which very important, in a way that kids would enjoy. It also has some interactive math related questions throughout with answers at the end of the book so you can see if you figured it out correctly.
I received a free e-copy of this book from NetGalley in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.
About the Book
A close and playful glimpse at the childhood of one of the world’s greatest geniuses and cultural icons, Katherine Johnson who was the subject of the hit film Hidden Figures!
Katherine Johnson grew up to be the first Black woman to work at NASA, figuring out the path for spacecrafts to go around the Earth and land on the Moon! But before she set her sights on outer space, she was busy making the Earth’s surface her laboratory!
Equipped with a mind for math, nothing gets past Katherine: how did Noah manage to put 48,000 animals on his ark, not to mention all that feed?!
Accompanied by her brother Charlie and her chicken Lucinda, Katherine makes the world her playground and sometimes dreams of a Moon that could answer her questions… or even, growing up in the early 1900s, a more equal society where black people and white people could have the same rights…