Chanda Prescod-Weinstein did not write her debut book for me, and it took me too long to realize that.

“The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred” is a book for Black kids — the ones who live under a light-polluted sky next to the highway that once upon a time tore their neighborhood apart. They’re cosmic dreamers. Or at least they can be. Prescod-Weinstein believes that, and she wrote a book for them.

How many will actually be able to read it is another matter. Even if the kids get this 336-pager in their hands, it’s dense in science and follows a meandering path from slavery to scientific housework to capitalism and even to the merits of string theory vs. loop quantum gravity (don’t stress if you don’t know the difference). There’s an account of sexual assault and a case for why “dark matter” is a bad name for the mysterious staff that makes up 25% of matter in the universe.

But the book is always about showing Black kids the magic of science.

“At the same time,” she writes, “it’s terrible that Black people in America always seem to find ourselves in emergency mode, trying to save our own lives, rather than getting to indulge our impulses for curiosity and imagination.”

The non-science language is dense, too. Phrases like “white supremacist ableist heterocispatriarchy” might make you miss the talk of quarks and photons and fermions in the beginning of the book.

“The Disordered Cosmos” is a tricky read, if for no other reason than the book itself seems disordered at times. But I think that’s the point. Prescod-Weinstein has very complicated feelings about science and the people who do it, sometimes giving us insight into an internal dialogue that has clearly played out many times in her head.

Slavery “colonized the bodies of my ancestors,” she writes, and their cosmologies were erased. “I am left to reckon with the knowledge that this cosmology, the one with a genealogy this is mostly European and deeply in debt to some of the same men who facilitated the torture of my ancestors, is now my cosmology too.”

Prescod-Weinstein also has a feud with capitalism, lamenting a structure in academia and economics that rewards silence. “Everywhere we go, no matter how hard we try to avoid it, capitalism follows us,” she writes.

Prescod-Weinstein’s book is refreshingly different from other popular science books, written mostly by white men who try to oversell their knowledge of a particular subject. This book is less sure of itself — in both the scientific and non-scientific topics — but in a good way. It makes sense. It’s more honest and emotive. Prescod-Weinstein makes the book about herself without overshadowing her larger purpose: to inspire a world where Black kids can gaze at the stars and learn a thing or two about the universe.

“Cosmology requires multigenerational patience,” she writes.

So, too, does letting everyone enjoy it.