I never would have read this book on my own. I'd known that my English class had been resigned to the fate of reading a book titled The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks for a while, but when I found out that it was to be a nonfiction title, I dreaded it all the more. Upon receiving the book, I was at first startled by how audaciously orange the cover was. Though it was a bit painful to look at, I sat down on my sofa, turned up some music, opened that outlandish cover, and started at the book's prologue.

And, somehow, within what felt like two minutes, I'd already read farther than I'd been assigned, and was strangely depressed about having to stop reading. How had a nonfiction book caught my attention so easily, when it had been years since I'd actually managed to read one the entire way through? What was happening to me, and how could I ever admit to myself that I'd been genuinely beguiled by something that was not fantasy, or sci-fi, or even fiction? Thankfully, before dismissing all of it as an act of dark magic, I realized that it was simple.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is not written like a work of nonfiction.

The book is about a woman named Henrietta Lacks, who had a case of cervical cancer that was ultimately fatal to her. While she was in the hospital, scientists studying cell culture took her cancer cells without permission, and those cells never died. Henrietta's cells, code named HeLa, were sent all over the world (even out of the world, literally) for scientists to perform research on. Henrietta's family had no idea that this was happening until decades after Henrietta's death, and the situation has had lasting repercussions on them to this day. In present times, HeLa can be found in almost any science lab in the world.

The book is written in a captivating narrative style that isn't typical to works of nonfiction. In her writing, Rebecca Skloot address several issues of morality, such as family, informed consent, human experimentation, and racism, but does so in a way that doesn't just throw a simple answer at readers--she entitles readers to interpret her writing in whatever way they wish, while covertly employing a strategic use of logos, ethos, and pathos to convey her own opinion in a way that isn't too forceful. Skloot depicts everything vividly without mincing details, and presents both sides of any arguments. The way that she portrays the characters makes them relatable, believable, and realistic. Instead of being two-dimensional people that Skloot happened to meet as she was collecting information on Henrietta, they are all real people, living in the real world, with real personalities and problems.

Rather than dumping facts on a page like an ordinary nonfiction book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks uses those facts to create a reason that they would actually matter to the reader. The narrative style keeps a reader captivated throughout the story, even to the point of creating a fiction feel, and has even more of an impact when the reader realizes that everything in the book is real. The story is intriguing, informative, and thoughtful, and leaves the reader with both a sense of melancholy and of satisfaction. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is easy to reflect upon, and I would recommend it to anyone who is either interested in the dark side of science or is looking to step out of their comfort zone and try reading something a little bit different.