Tara Westover’s memoir reminds one of the unusual upbringing and strange circumstances of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Tara’s childhood is full of extremist beliefs and dangerous situations. Her father clearly swings like a pendulum with his emotional highs and lows. His anti-government leanings and his strict belief in God’s will, put his family and himself at tremendous risk. It’s excruciating to read of Tara’s and her family’s severe injuries that never resulted in a hospital stay or treatment by a doctor.

Simple things like a birth certificate, education of any sort and an absence of precautions taken when working in a hazardous environment, all make for a bizarre childhood. There is no common sense, no acknowledgement of domestic injuries, no conforming to societal norms. This is a family that preaches that the government is out to get them – literally. They eschew the value of learning and boast of the healing powers of herbs and oils made by Tara’s mother and based upon her feelings. Truths are supplanted by a fake reality and everyone is forced to kowtow.

Reading of the Westovers is like being introduced to a fantastical story but this is set on a real mountain in Idaho. The family members are deniers of the highest order and they cling to their own style of Mormon extremism. Tara and a couple of her siblings find they desire to learn and do manage to go to college despite having no formal training. They are not in lockstep with their parents and they try to establish lives away from the family. Tara is the youngest and she has a terrible time overcoming the family brainwashing and pressure to deny facts of abuse. It’s difficult for her to wear normal discreet clothing, to let a boy touch her arm, to use modern conveniences, to befriend outsiders who don’t subscribe to the paranoid beliefs of the family. Her inner turmoil is another suffering that she must endure in her breaking away from the strict edicts her parents have imposed.

This is a riveting read, one that will fill readers with incredulity and horror. Tara is blunt in her portrayal of her family as she replays events through an unemotional lens. Perhaps writing the book was therapeutic in her struggle to understand the outrageousness of her upbringing. In a world where extremism and anti-government feelings are on the rise, this book gives an insight into the life of someone who refuses to conform to any norms, who creates his own reality and who dominates others under his control. Readers should be prepared for an eye-opening portrayal of a dysfunctional family that to some, are an inspiration. But it’s a monstrous model of behavior that is dangerous and frightening.

Ugh... this is hard for me. I had SUCH high expectations for this one with all the glowing 4-5 star reviews on I have seen on other social media sites.

And.. how can you give a review for a book that was mediocre for me? This is not my usual genre for one... so I was stepping outside of my comfort genre in reading a memoir. And this is hard to give a review on someone's life haha.

For some reason... I just couldn't connect in this one. I felt like every page that I turned in this one... was just lacking that awesome feeling I get when I am fully submerged in a book I love.

What I did enjoy was the message behind this one. I will always be blessed with my education and my master's degree. So.. I can definitely point out how much I loved this aspect of the book.

Additionally, I felt there was so many dark memories intertwined in this one and felt the book could have been a tad bit more positive.

Unfortunately, I was just expecting a tab bit more and am an outlier on this one.

3 stars

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for the arc!

Published to GR: 5/28/18
Publication date: 2/20/18

This is a gripping, intense memoir about a woman raised in a survivalist family who, against all odds, goes to college. At the beginning, Westover takes a while to set the scene—describing each of her siblings and family members and how they interact. By the time she leaves home for college, the reader is hooked. The tension ratchets up as her family's worldview begins to collide with her own burgeoning understanding of history and politics. The "characters," who are real people, are unforgettable (particularly Westover's father and brother Shawn, both menacing and complicated figures). This shares similarities with The Glass Castle but is a grittier read.

Fascinating, disturbing, memoir about a young woman raised in a very isolated life on a mountain in Idaho, where she does not attend school (with only a pretense of homeschooling), but somehow goes on to attend college and even obtain her PhD. Her father has some very extreme views, including no medical treatment allowed (even for the most disturbing of injuries, which seem to happen a lot in her family), no contact with the government, a general belief that the end of days are coming - which he couches as religious but in her adulthood looking back she can see are really a symptom of mental illness, and her mother is extremely passive, not to mention her disturbingly abusive brother... This is one of those truth is stranger than fiction memoirs like "The Glass Castle," where if it were fiction rather than non-fiction you would say it was totally over the top and not believable. Although at times it is frustrating that it takes Tara so long to break out from her family, not just physically but also mentally even after she has physically left Idaho, she is certainly a sympathetic figure. There are some things the memoir kind of glosses over, but it was definitely a powerful read.

I finished this book several weeks ago, and I'm still thinking about it. What a powerful book. Highly recommend.

This book was remarkable; the author pulls you into her life. Born to a survivalist Mormon family, her father is the head of the home and makes that known at every turn. Paranoid of the government and the medical establishment the children receive a “homeschooled education” and are expected to work for their father at a very young again. While Tara would sometimes help her mother, an herbalist and midwife, with oils and tinctures, she was also called out to the junkyard to help her father gather scrap. The work in the junkyard is the cause of multiple injuries to family members over the years with tonics and salves given by their mother that are shockingly inadequate. Tara also suffers at the hand of an abusive brother…but everything is the Lord's way. As Tara looks to a life outside of her small world she seeks an education that, while makes her more complete, pulls her farther and farther away from family, from home.

I really enjoyed Tara's story of her life, her education. I am always drawn to solid memoirs which tell various stories. Tara Westover has a way of sharing her story with a perfect mixture of imagery and plot descriptions. I was captivated about Tara's resilience, when everyone, those dearest to her turned her back on her- she persisted to gain her education and move forward. She could have easily shrank back to that little girl to appease her father, to endure the abuse once more, but she trusted herself to continue her education and free herself from her families grasp. Big praise to Tara Westover!

Educated is an amazing testament to the power of education. I have recommended this book to many friends and customers. Tara Westover's honesty about her doubts and challenges in her journey to discover her own path in life is breathtaking.

I am currently buying books for the library at school and I greatly enjoyed this title. I like to buy a good spread of books from YA to non-fiction so that the young people read as diverse a group of books as possible. I feel like this book would be a challenging, interesting and unusual pick, that would certainly give the young people at my school a great deal to talk about at our next Book Speed Dating events. I will certainly be recommending it to our school librarian and can't wait to hear what the kids think of it too!

About 50 pages in, I could hardly stop reading. Educated is a book I will be sharing with others as a must read memoir.

Stunning. Heartwrenching. Incredible. Tara Westover's tenacity in the face of a traumatic childhood (and young adulthood) is nearly incomprehensible at times. The prose is positively stunning. One of the best nonfiction books I've ever read, hands down, and one of the best books I've read this year, if not ever (and I have been averaging a book per day for the past year and a half). I cannot recommend this book more highly.

What a wonderful book! An astounding memoir of an extraordinary life, this book kept me completely engrossed. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year, and I read a lot. This is one of those books you will remember for a long time, one that changes the way you think about life.
Tara Westover was raised in an isolated area of Idaho and grew up in an abusive, survivalist family, believing the world would end very soon and that only by following all the instructions of her paranoid father, would they be saved from the coming apocalypse. They practiced an extreme form of Mormonism, one not recognized by the official Mormon church. They believed the government was the enemy that would be coming for them, so they didn’t get birth certificates or enroll their children in school. They also believed that injuries and illness could be cured by faith and herbs, so they very rarely went to the hospital, only for the most life threatening afflictions. If that wasn’t enough, she had a brother who abused her severely, and a mother who pretended not to see it. Her father had little regard for her wellbeing, often requiring dangerous tasks that seriously injured her, as well as her siblings
Tara Westover had to educate herself, extricate herself from that strange belief system and come to terms with her history of abuse. She was incredibly successful, eventually earning a PhD and teaching at Cambridge University, although it took years of struggle to overcome the trauma of her childhood. This is the amazing story of how she accomplished that, so well written that the pages fly by. Prepare to be engrossed.
I highly recommend this book.

Note: I received an advance copy of the ebook from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

As violent as Tara's childhood was, she still found the courage to educate her way out of her dysfunctional family. A gritty story about a survivalist family, and the role Mormon doctrine played in their family.

This was such a fascinating read. Being a teacher, I always enjoy reading books about the profession. This did not disappoint. It was such an interesting life story. I couldn’t put it down.

Read the book. The environment that Westover grew up in was claustrophobic. However, she went to the best colleges and universities so I don't understand what her beef with her parents is. So the father is a religious demagogue. The mother is an enabler and sufferer. The siblings grow up either in the Bear mountain or outside of it and hence are disconnected from each other.

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover is an incredibly powerful book. It tells a brutal, but redemptive story of a young woman born to a survivalist family in the Idaho wilderness who ends up earning her PhD from Cambridge. It is a painful, but compelling read that I highly recommend.

Ms. Westover was born in 1986 the youngest of seven children to a father who chose to move his family far from the radar of normal American life. A father who does not believe in sending his children to school, availing his family of medical care, or trusting the government in any way. A father who believes the world will end when the new millennium comes. And a mother who acquiesces.

It is the story of a family and upbringing on the fringes of American society, who for most of the novel does not embrace America as the land of opportunity. It is the story of mental illness, and physical hardship. Yet the author never sounds melodramatic—only articulate—as she describes how she manages to escape this childhood to attend college with no formal or real education—only the study of books. It is a powerful testament to the human spirit and the power of the written word. Westover writes: “Learning in our family was entirely self-directed,”. “You could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done.”

That work began with long days in the family junkyard under very dangerous working conditions with little time to learn anything. Yet Westover, with the encouragement of a brother who manages to escape to college, manages to teach herself enough to pass the ACT and get accepted by Brigham Young University. Her knowledge is very spotty however. During an art history lecture in her first term Westover came across a word she had never encountered before. When Westover raised her hand to ask. “I don’t know this word,” “What does it mean?”, she describes as “an almost violent silence” that followed. The professor answers, “Thanks for that” and continued with the lecture. Afterwards, a previously friendly classmate tells her, “You shouldn’t make fun of that” and walks away. Confused, Westover went to the computer lab and looked up the word. Then she understood the reaction to her question. The word was “Holocaust”.

Thank you Random House and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader’s Copy of this noteworthy memoir.

This is a real jaw-dropper of a memoir. Tara Westover is raised in an isolated fundamentalist Mormon family in Idaho. Her father is a bipolar and paranoid survivalist, with a deep distrust of government. The Westover children run wild, helping their father with his junkyard scrapping business and their mother with her mid-wifing and herbal and essential oil concoctions. The children do not go to school and are not (for the most part) home schooled beyond the very basics of reading and arithmetic. They see no doctors, trusting their mother entirely for their medical care with her home remedies. The father rules the roost, the mother submitting to his authority over the household. While there is no doubt the parents loved their children, the father's mental illness and the mother's acquiescence to him failed them all.

Westover's memoir recounts her astonishing journey from ignorant backwoods wildchild to Cambridge scholar. Her childhood memories are fraught with family incidents that defy belief - multiple car accidents with traumatic head injuries; junkyard scrapping injuries including falls, extremities being crushed and gashed, severe burns; and physical and verbal abuse at the hands of a psychotic and manipulative sibling. The amount of physical injury in this book is staggering. If even ONE of these things happened in your family, it would be traumatic enough. Add all of these together in one family AND have almost no proper medical care, it's just incomprehensible. I have a hard time believing these incidents were as serious as Westover describes with no one dying. For example, a third degree burn victim being healed at home with comfrey, lobelia and plantain salves and enemas for hydration due to mouth and lung burns? With no medication for pain or a sterile environment or skin grafts? It's nothing short of a miracle.

It's a very interesting and gripping story. In spite of all the familial trauma Westover underwent, her perseverance and drive led her to Brigham Young University, where she had to bring herself up to speed on the world events and societal conventions that all of us learned in elementary and secondary schools. She had never heard of The Holocaust until it was discussed in one of her college classes. After Brigham Young, she continued her education at Cambridge University and Harvard, earning a PhD in history at Cambridge. Interestingly, two of her brothers who separated themselves physically from the family also earned PhDs. The other siblings who remained close to home, including the abusive brother, did not fare as well in their lives. The parents started a successful business, Butterfly Express Quality Essential Oils, based on the mother's homeopathic remedies and they appear to be doing quite well.

After I was finished with the memoir, I was curious about how her revelations went down with the rest of her family. Even though she used pseudonyms for most of her family's first names, it takes about 30 seconds on Google and Facebook to sort things out and find the family members and the Butterfly Express website. According to her family's attorney, the parents feel maligned by Westover's account and basically claim that what Westover deems an extremist mindset, the parents view as "self-sufficiency." Uh huh....I guess, technically, neglect and abuse CAN lead to self-sufficency of a sort. Leave it to an attorney to come up with that one.

Hard to put down (except the burn parts, I had to keep putting the book down for those brief sections). I think this is mostly a truthful account of how Westover perceived events in her life. Possibly exaggerated, but who knows except for Tara what she endured? Perception is reality, and this is her reality. Mostly, I am pretty awed by her resilience and drive.

Recommended to those who enjoyed Jeanette Walls' "The Glass Castle."

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for an ARC of this knockout of a memoir. My review, However, is based on the hardcover version.

This true story about Tara Westover, the daughter of survivalists living in the mountains of Ohio will capture your attention and you won't be able to let it go until well after finishing the last page. Seriously, this book is one that will stay with you for life. 

Tara didn't set foot in an educational classroom until she was 17. She never saw a doctor or a nurse. But when one of her older brothers escaped his family's world and got himself into college, he brought back stories of a "new" world that interested Tara immensely. She decided she wanted to experience this outside world. But not before first teaching herself all kinds of subjects, including math, grammar and science. After taking the ACT, she was accepted to Brigham Young University, and her new life only just began in those halls. 

Tara's story moved me in a way I haven't experienced from very many books, and I've read a LOT of books! This was an amazing story, and to know it's a true story only makes you fall in love with Tara all the more. I am not a huge non-fiction reader, but this one was fabulous. Read it!!

This book took what I call guts to write. There were times I cringed, smiled, got teary eyed, and deeply admired her strength and perseverance. I felt a wide variety of emotions while reading this and had to take a few breathers due to the intensity of the book. I appreciate the book itself because this isn't some celebrity "look at me" kind of memoir but one of for once being a role model in our society dominated by pop-stars, athletes, and reality tv. Tara is strong, brave, well-written, intelligent, and a role model for woman and girls, such as my daughter. Thank you Netgalley and Random House for the e-copy arc to read in exchange for an honest review.

I anticipated that this might be a 5 star read for me but it didn’t quite make it there. I suspect some of that had to do with the number of interviews with the author I heard before picking up the book. In many ways, major components of the book were ‘spoiled’ in those interviews and therefore didn’t have the emotional resonance that they may have if I’d come into the book without the interviews. This is one that had a ton of buzz. I heard about it everywhere! That can sometimes impact my enjoyment of a book. Despite the preconceived notions that I may have had going in, this is a really good and interesting memoir. Tara’s story is powerful and disturbing and gut-wrenching. Try not to read a ton about this one before picking it up – just jump into this one with little information.

It’s a powerful story that really brings to life so many different things in an interesting and thought-provoking way – education, fundamentalism, health care, mental health, parenting, neglect and abuse, and ideas of family and home. I highly recommend this one. It’s unlike anything I’ve read before – Tara Westover is an amazing person and reading her story will give you a view of her troubled and fascinating family.