As an investigation into women geniuses of history, why they’ve been so overshadowed by their male equivalents (and lesser thans), and the formula behind what makes a genius, I thought The Genius of Women may become one of my top nonfiction of the year (yes, already).

The first few chapters had me smitten; feminist and fabulously written and researched. Kaplan has a knack for summing up a person in one sentence, both physically and their personality, and for creating some of the catchiest chapter titles I’ve ever heard. (“The Dark Lord Trying to Kill off Women Scientists” and “How to Succeed in Business by Wearing Elegant Scarves” being just two examples.) The story is interspersed with just enough personal commentary to provide some humor and give us a glimpse into the woman behind the words but not so much that it takes the story away from the geniuses. 

Unfortunately, the good parts of this story were buried in a lot of bad.

I soon realized that as intriguing as the chapters sounded, their titles had little to do with the figure or issues addressed, which made them overall more gimmicky than anything. Kaplan not only has a knack for naming but for transitions, which were utilized extremely often. Chapters would begin, often, with the mentioned topic and quickly meander through an extensive series of other topics, so that, by the time we were finished, I had no idea where we had begun, which made it difficult to retain any of the multitudes of information. With so much going on, any meaningful quotes and data end up drowning in all the other discussions.

Every chapter feels like its own feature story, which isn’t intrinsically a bad thing, but in this case, meant that almost half of every section was conclusion. The reading experience of this is inevitably that the book seems as if it’s ending eighteen times…and yet, it continues, which makes it drag. With so much narration, there ends up being a lot of repetition and overlap, which ensures that the themes of the story are heard loud and clear (many times), but also seems to slight the reader on realizing their own thoughts. The book became so repetitious at times that I truly thought I had skipped back to the wrong section and was re-reading it once more. 

The even more unfortunate result of so much narration is that it completely trumps the stories of the women that this book is supposed to be focused on. I can be partially to blame for expecting more of a Hidden Figures story, where we finally get to hear the untold tales of these women from beginning to end, following a more story-like structure than an academic piece. But, in comparison to the sheer amount of research that Kaplan clearly did, and the number of interviews she had with these women, there’s very little of it in the final version. We may get one or two quotes from any particular woman, and although they’re well-picked, it seemed minuscule in the scope of things. This book would have been so much better and more memorable if it had just let the experiences of these women stand on their own without all the narration. 

With all of Kaplan’s research, we get a wide range of genius women in a multitude of fields, but there was one group of people who were left out: trans women, and non-binary folks. I wouldn’t necessarily expect there to be a discussion of non-binary geniuses in a book specifically about women, but then Kaplan includes a discussion with someone (who, understandably, wanted to remain anonymous) where they wonder whether there are so many people coming out as non-binary because women face so much oppression. Clearly Kaplan never interviews a non-binary person to get their take on it, or it would have been obvious that this is not only very much not true, but that people who are non-binary usually face more oppression than cis-gendered people…so it doesn’t even make sense…Even though the argument was suggested as having only belonged to the person Kaplan is talking to (rather than herself), it didn’t seem right that it was included without ever being further explored, which would have been so easy to do, while all other topics in the book are thoroughly investigated.

I rated The Genius of Women 2.5 out of 5 stars. 

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Group/ Dutton for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.