Lab Girl

Oh, this is a good one, the sort of book you feel has been welling up inside its author, waiting to burst out. An unlikely but wonderful amalgam of plant science (Jahren's specialty and passion) and memoir, Lab Girl is both finely crafted and raw: Jahren is a star scientist with a gift for explaining the miraculous poetry of plants, but she is equally eloquent about the desperate, single-minded passion that has driven her career and that sometimes seems like the only thing that's holding the lives of her and her lifelong work partner, Bill, together. The comparison to Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk (and to Gabrielle Hamilton's Blood, Bones, and Butter) is obvious, but that doesn't mean I won't make it when I push this book into your hands for the rest of the year.