Before the first chapter opens, Hope Jahren runs through the “staggering” (3) numbers of plants on land as she begins to explain her interest in geobiology.She encourages her readers to study a leaf and ask a question about that leaf, then states: “Guess what? You are now a scientist” (4).

Jahren travels back to her early childhood in a small Minnesota town where she remembers “a lot of cold and darkness” (12). She lives there with her father, mother, and three older brothers. Her father is a scientist and professor at a community college, and young Jahren spends a great deal of time in the lab with him in the evenings as he prepares for class. Every night they walk the two miles home “in silent togetherness” (9) before Jahren puts herself to bed.

Jahren’s mother stays at home, doing housework and tending to her garden in the summer. Since she dropped out of college as a young woman, Jahren’s mother studies to complete her B.A. in English as Jahren grows up.

Jahren attends the University of Minnesota on scholarship, at first studying literature but then transferring to science. In 2009, when Jahren is 40, she and her team make breakthrough in isotope chemistry by building a machine that could work “side by side” with a mass spectrometer, the latter of which is scientific scale that “can tell the difference between an atom with twelve nucleons and an atom with thirteen nucleons” (21).