I’m glad I picked this up–it’s an academic study of giftedness and how gifted people (especially children and adolescents) develop. This is significant, as gifted youth have a tendency to be cognitively “ahead” of their peers, but this advancement also makes it difficult for them to socialize with others, share their emotions, and so on. This book stands in stark contrast to self-help books for gifted adults, such as The Gifted Adult and Your Rainforest Mind. Rather than devolving into self-affirming platitudes, Rinn has a lot to tell us about what this actually means.

Don’t expect to see many humans here, a lot of the book is a metastudy that synthesizes studies put together by others. There’s a fair amount of statistics, modeling, and hypothesizing, but the text lacks the human touch. It doesn’t matter: that’s the point. There’s a lot to learn from this level of abstraction, although it might be better paired with other works for a sense of what it is like to be “gifted.”