This is unlike anything I have ever read. It reads like fiction, but it's all real. Sometimes I had to remind myself that everything about Henrietta is true. That the people in the book are real.

The year the book came out, I volunteered at Printer's Row Lit Fest in Chicago. Rebecca Skloot was there to talk about her book. I had never heard of it or her, and the session was during our lunch break, so I was more focused on my cheeseburger than on this woman who wrote some weird sci-fi book. I brushed it off.

But I never stopped hearing about the book after that. It popped up everywhere. It landed in my lap at a church yard sale and I stuck it on my shelf. A few months later, a journalism professor lauded it as one of the best examples of journalism.

Skloot spent 11 years working on this book. Eleven. Let that sink in. So much of it was trying to get the family to talk to her, then spending years getting to know the family. This is dedication.

Science. History. Compassion. THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS has it all.