Lab Girl

Renowned scientist Hope Jahren has constructed three labs where she has researched soil, seeds, flowers, and trees. Although it is a groundbreaking study on plants, her first book is much more than that.

The novel Lab Girl explores the themes of labour, love, and the potential for transformation when these three elements are together. Jahren tells her stories to tell the story of how she found a haven in science and learned to perform lab work "with both the heart and the hands"; about her upbringing in rural Minnesota with an unyielding mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in the classroom's labs; and about the inevitable setbacks but also the triumphs and thrilling discoveries of scientific work.

Nonetheless, the central narrative of this book is the bond Jahren developed with Bill, a wise and wounded man who ends up being both her lab colleague and closest friend. Their somewhat erratical scientific expeditions transport them from the Midwest to the United States and back, over the Atlantic to the North Pole's always lit sky, and finally to tropical Hawaii, where she now resides with her lab.