You could say two threads run through the life of Hope Jahren (B.A. ’91) and, over time, they’ve come together to ribbon into a unique bow.

A former geobiologist at the University of Oslo in Norway and at the University of Hawaii, Jahren built a remarkable career studying the ancient stories of fossilized plant life. In one of many discoveries, she analyzed trees on an island in Nunavut, Canada, and outlined the potential environmental conditions in the region 45 million years ago.

But those aren’t the only narratives that inspire Jahren, who now lives in Reykjavik, Iceland. She is also the author of three books—one of which, her memoir Lab Girl, earned several literary awards in 2017. Most recently, she took her first dip into young adult fiction with an imaginative look at Mary Jane, the love interest in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Published in July 2024, Adventures of Mary Jane came to Jahren when she reread Huckleberry Finn during her years at the U of M. That secondary character never “sat right” with Jahren, as she writes in the novel’s introduction. “Neither could I reconcile her passivity (‘You tell me what to do, and whatever you say, I’ll do it’) with the fact that a boy as intrepid as Huck falls so deeply in love with her. ... That girl is up to something, part of me kept insisting.”

In her new book, which begins in northern Minnesota in 1846, 14-year-old Mary Jane Guild receives a letter from her Aunt Evelyn asking for help. Mary Jane travels the Mississippi River to Illinois, then Mississippi, and back again. Along the way, she befriends a range of people, and learns a slew of valuable lessons, including independence: “Have you ever once seen a girl out by herself, wandering as her fancy takes her?”

In part, Jahren’s book is the story of women establishing themselves as the main characters in their own story. For Jahren, fictionalizing Mary Jane’s fuller character development felt like a natural extension of her writing. She says, “So often in books like that, female characters are presented as facile, and I just couldn’t get over the idea that there had to be way more going on with Mary Jane, and I dreamt of exactly what that might be. There’s a lot of different ways to celebrate the feminine in new contexts.”

Writing these tales seems something of a leap from the work on which Jahren staked her reputation for the past two decades, delving into the relationships between plants and the soil, revealing how these interactions affect nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, and ecosystem health. The winner of the James B. Macelwane Medal of the American Geophysical Union, three Fulbright Awards, and one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016, Jahren has also simulated atmospheres from ancient eras and then grown plants inside those conditions to understand how life survives seismic changes.

“I’ve written a lot of academic papers, and it always felt like trying to crack the code of how this community talks to each other, and how can I phrase something that will be interesting for someone to read,” Jahren says. “When you’re cramming 10 years’ worth of academic work into just a few pages, it’s almost like writing poetry,” she adds.

In Lab Girl, Jahren wrote about what motivated her to work in science, particularly about the challenges she faced as a woman in the field. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in 2017 and the Young Adult Science Book Award at the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books.

“I really enjoyed telling readers about the things I cared about, how I spent my time, what made me miserable, what brought me joy,” Jahren recalls. 

Now in Iceland researching her next unnamed young adult novel, Jahren intends to continue this next chapter in her writing career. She says, “I’ve seen how books can be so influential on a young person. The idea of possibly making it into somebody’s life with a book, that seems really incredible to me."

David Silverburg is a freelance writer in Ontario, Canada.

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