This was a really interesting book, but it was also very hard to read because of the continued, yet true, references to how doctors and scientists thought of (and sadly in some cases still do) think about people of color when it comes to experiments or medical procedures. There were more than a handful of times that I had to put it down and take a break and ‘cut’ it with other lighter books because, as amazing at the HeLa cells are, it is tragic what happened to this woman and her family. One of the parts that got me the most was the fate of Elsie Lacks, Henrietta’s eldest daughter.

This book was real, and Rebecca made it a point to state that she stayed authentic to how the people spoke. She didn’t sugar coat anything or make them sound any different than they were and that added to the realism because you could tell that she was pretty much copying everything verbatim. Many times, with biographies or books of that nature, language is ‘prettied’ up which brings a sense of falseness to the book. None of that was here, at least to me. I enjoyed, as much as I could, the journey of Rebecca and Deborah in finding out what happened to Henrietta and how her cells were helping. Yes, there is a bit of a problematic aspect that it took someone outside of the family and their ethnic background to get this done and I’m sure most people would ascribe that to the ‘white savior’ aspect. But it didn’t seem that Deborah minded the help since she ultimately just wanted to know her mother and this helped her too. I think that is what I really liked about this; that ultimately it was a journey for a woman to learn more about her mother and the type of woman she was because was robbed of that. Personally, I feel a lot of that was on the doctor’s and their dismissal of Henrietta as a person as I doubt that a misdiagnosis of that magnitude would have been made if she weren’t a Black woman. And it’s been said many times, but it bears repeating that it’s a new level of tragic that Henrietta’s cells have done so much for science and medicine, and her family can’t even afford basic health care.

This is a great book and one I think everyone should read but be warned there are parts that will likely make you have to put down the book. For me one of those moments was reading about something called pneumoencephalography and what it entailed. This is not an easy read by any means but it is an important one to learn more about the history of science, medicine, and how specific groups of people were treated in our country in the past in hopes of not repeating it in the future.