I sat down to read this book thinking it was purely a non-fiction look into Henrietta's case, which I had discussed in a bioethics class over a year ago. However, the journey that Skloot took me on was much more than that and revealed the ultimate tragedy of HeLa - that the family did not know so much about their Mother as well as the fact that they are not entitled to any of the profits made off of her cells. This book was more about Henrietta and her family than it was about her cells, and I understand why that is. The afterword is shocking (though I knew much of what it was telling me already) when you realize that pieces of our body are no longer our own once they're removed. The ethical issues that began with Henrietta surely are not going away and I thoroughly enjoyed the read - even though at some points I was gripping my stomach at the descriptions of medical experimentation.