Gripping. Moving. At times horrifying.

I couldn’t put this book down, which is why I’m writing this review at 3AM. This first person narrative of the author’s life illustrates how her family’s homeschooling and fundamentalist, cult-like religious zeal ended up sheltered, abused, and almost brainwashed her. Their extreme distrust of government & society combined with likely mental illness plays out like a coming of age thriller, made all the more frightening since it is a true story.

I received this book as a free ARC from Random House & NetGalley.

I loved reading about this author, who was raised in an extreme Mormon family, raised totally off the grid, not even "homeschooled", yet she went on to earn a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. Her story is inspirational, amazed at what one can achieve in spite of all the barriers put in place. I was spellbound by her story and I think you will be too.

I love reading memoirs. There is something about hearing someone's experience in their own words that is really powerful and resonating. This book was amazing. All the things that Tara Westover experienced and overcame was incredible. She had so many reasons to quit and I feel like most people wouldn't have blamed her. She suffered incredible emotional abuse and it took her a long time to even begin to overcome it. Somewhere inside herself she found the strength to break the destructive patterns of the life she was given and overcome incredible challenges.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2249242818

This memoir is heartbreaking. The children grow up in such unnecessary squalor that it is difficult not to be angry with the parents. Their suspicion of the government and schools lead them to lead such an isolated, subsistence life. Their distrust of hospitals leads them to endure much more pain than is necessary. The memoir drew me in and made me care for Westover’s family. It is a testament to how mental illness can affect an entire family. It is also a testament to how, with a bit of outside support, one can rise up from an extremely difficult childhood and change the trajectory of her life. .

I received this book courtesy of Netgalley and its publisher, Random House, and, boy, am I glad I received it. This was a book that I flew through. I simply couldn’t put it down. I seldom give five stars to a book. A book with five-star book is one that will “stay” with me for a long time. “Educated” met the criteria.

This a true story about the life of a young woman. She grew up in the mountains in Utah. The story is remarkable. It is hard to believe someone’s parents would have the strong beliefs described, such as religion, government, and medicine. Life on the mountain was appalling. It is amazing the author was able to enter college with virtually little primary education. Her college journey is astounding and incredible she graduated from college with a Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate.

It is an inspirational story and shows how an education can change a person. Also, the surprising impact on the family when an education is obtained. As the book stated, “the three who had left the mountain, and the four who had stayed. The three with doctorates, and the four without high school diplomas. A chasm had appeared, and was growing.”

An amazing memoir of a young lady who one of seven children of two devout, pious Mormons who are all ruled under the strict hand of the patriarch of the family. This memoir illustrates what happens when untreated mental illness meets religious overzealousness and how education liberates one from it all.

Having had no formal schooling and only a will to escape the abuse and dangers at home, Tara determines to educate herself thereby creating distance between herself and her family. She constantly questions her decisions and is in consistent turmoil over the her educational attainments and how it contradicts with her family's religious beliefs and all that she has ever been taught. Ultimately, she knows, and eventually accepts, that her education will wedge a great divide between her past and her future.

The author's style of writing left me completely enthralled from beginning to end. Not only did she tell her story with ease using accessible language, but she described her characters so well that I felt instantly connected to the family. I felt her pain when Shawn pulled her hair and shoved her head into the toilet. I totally understood her fear and hesitation of working with her careless father. And I understood that despite her family being completely dysfunctional, she still loved them and wanted a relationship with them -- but a healthy one. I was hopeful until the very end that they would all get the help they so truly needed, so that healing could take place. I'm happy that she has embraced her extended family and pray one day her parents will find it in her their hearts to give her the support she needs so that she heal from Shawn's abuse.

I preferred this book to Hillbilly Elegy because it is not so repetitive and for a woman to do what Tara did it is much more complicated compared to what she would have to endure if she was a boy. That said it was an emotional reading even if a compelling one.

Questo libro mi é piaciuto di piú rispetto ad Hillbilly Elegy, fondamentalmente perché molto meno ripetitivo, ma soprattutto perché Tara é una donna e per riuscire a fare quello che ha fatto lei da ragazza, é sicuramente piú difficile rispetto al farlo da maschio. Detto questo, é stata una lettura emotivamente molto pesante, per quanto non riuscissi a smettere.

THANKS NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

"Educated" is the powerful first book by Tara Westover, who grew up in the mountains of Idaho, in a survivalist Mormon family, with six siblings. She didn’t receive a birth certificate until she was nine years old and was never enrolled in public school or ever taken to a medical doctor. Instead of being in school, the Westover children were helping their parents prepare for the end of the world or a government takeover. Summers were spent canning food and hoarding supplies. “Home-schooling” consisted of being taught to read by their mother with the optional independent study of old textbooks. Their father’s scrapyard was their playground, and later a terrifying place to work.

The Westover children felt obligated to work for their father and it often put them in mortal danger. When things went wrong, and they inevitably and repeatedly did, traditional medical treatment was forbidden. Westover’s mother was a self-taught midwife and herbalist. And if she couldn’t cure/save you, it was God’s will. The most damaging relationship was with her brother Shawn; he was emotionally and physically abusive and at one point threatens to kill or have her killed. I was troubled each time Westover returned home; desperate to stay connected with her family even though they had damaged her in so many ways and were convinced she was possessed by the devil.

Like most of us, the author wanted to fit in with her peers and her upbringing made that impossible until she was an adult and able to break free of their hold and their myths. Her formal education began at 17 when she enrolled at BYU when she should have been finishing high school. She went on to graduate magna cum laude, and then earned a MA and a PhD from Trinity College in Cambridge, England.

"Educated" is a Mormon twist on "The Glass Castle" (by Jeannette Walls). Westover’s memoir is beautifully written: elegant, tragic, yet hopeful, all at the same time. It’s cliché, but I couldn’t put it down.

I received an ARC ebook courtesy of NetGalley, all opinions are my own.

If you're looking to get your fill of memoirs for the year, you've come to the right place. "Educated: The Memoir" by Tara Westover is a heartfelt, moving, coming of age story. Beautifully written, the author takes us through years of abuse, both physical and psychological, to the present day in which she is a successful PhD holder.

I give this book five out of five stars and cannot recommend it more highly. Westover's voice is unique, managing to be both authentically agonized and hopeful at the same time. I have truly never read anything like it.

For a full review, please visit Blonde Bibliotaph at the link below.

This was a bit much for me. Unlike the The Glass Castle or The Great Alone (memoir and fiction respectively) that both also center around a family with an unhinged patriarch, Educated offers little light in the darkness. The aforementioned examples were both hard and uncomfortable reads, but I was left a changed person. Educated didn't move me. The writing is a little bland, the tangents into her academia were downright boring, and the ludicrousness of each encounter and conversation just left me aghast. There was no internal conflict here - I could find no redeeming qualities in any of these people, and I can't understand why this was a memoir and not a court document for a restraining order.

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: To see and experience more truth than those given to me by my father, and to use those truth to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of views, was at the heart of what it means to self create.”
I think it’s been a few hours I finished this book, but I just can’t stop thinking about it. It’s one of those books that push you out of your own circle and make you think of things you never did. I feel so much respect for this woman, who was born in a very conservative, abusive environment, and still took an active role to lead her own life rather than watching it lead by others.
Tara Westover was born in Buck Peak, Idaho into a conservative Mormon community. She didn’t have a birth certificate, didn’t go to school, didn’t go to hospital. Her father didn’t believe in the government and any system that belongs to it. As she grew older, things got worse. Her father became very unpredictable, and she had a violent relationship with her older brother. At sixteen, she decided to educate herself. And this mesmerizing journey ended up in Cambridge and Harvard.
This book is about her never ending conflict between loyalty to family while finding her own truth and making a life for herself. It’s a beautifully written memoir with great talent and modesty. Throughout her story, I felt she was weak and strong, courageous and scared all at the same time. And I’m sure everyone will find a part of Tara in themselves.
At times, the content was hard to read, and I’m very sensitive about reading abusive relationships in a very graphic style. But, Westover’s style didn’t cause me to shy away from it. Her telling felt very natural, not over the top. It didn’t feel like she was trying to tear my heart into pieces. She told what happened very calmly, as impartial as possible.
I think I will think about this book for a long time, and it will be one of my non-fiction favourites. A definite 5 star read.
Big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Random House for providing a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

An impressive piece of nonfiction that will leave the reader stunned by the obstacles overcame by the writer and how much she managed to achieve compared to what she had when she started her life. There are so many lessons to learned from this book and although I would recommend this to anyone, I think it would be amazing if the young people with confidence issues out there read this, to understand it is possible to achieve anything, be someone you want, if you work hard enough and believe yourself. I don't often read non-fiction but this book deserves to be read. Tara Westover. deserves an applause.

Tara Westover begins her memoir with a prologue description of the land on which she grew up as the wind whips her hair across her face and she looks upward to the mountain at the dark form of the Indian Princess. The princess, buried in the snow as if covered against the cold during the winter, reemerges each spring.

The mesmerizing memoir shows a young girl, one of seven siblings, first finding a way to endure with a father who stockpiles supplies and plans for shelter against the end times and a mother who is an unlicensed midwife collecting and selling homeopathic remedies. Little contact is allowed with the outside world except for their church where the parents’ ideas take Mormonism into an extreme form. From a young age, Tara works in dangerous conditions in her father’s scrap iron business with little regard for safety before a brother bullies her unmercifully with tacit parental approval as she begins to come of age.

Tara begins to find her way out of this situation through education, entering Brigham Young University without having been to public school and with little in the way of homeschooling that she has not taught herself. Yet she continues to be drawn back to family and the mountain with its Indian Princess. Her family leaves the reader head-shaking as they waffle between denial, rationalization, accusation, and occasional glimpses of something that could be taken for love if you look hard enough.

Some of the fascination of this memoir comes from watching which of the siblings get out of this restricting situation to become survivors and which ones buy into it and continue its hurtful pattern. I read an advance copy of the book that came out on February 20. I’m predicting you should read a copy if you want to join the book conversation that will have book lovers talking.

An interesting book that takes a look at a family who lives on the fringe with her survivalist family. Her father was anti-education and so Westover’s childhood was filled with teachings must different than the traditional kind. It’s been compared to The Glass Castle and I’d say that’s an apt description.

Educated is the memoir of Tara Westover, the youngest of seven children raised in the mountains of Idaho by fundamentalist Mormon parents. She entered a classroom for the first time at the age of 17, having taught herself enough algebra to score enough on the ACT to get into BYU. she literally and figuratively climbed out of the scrap pile that was her backyard. At times, her story is very difficult to read: her brother abusive and her parents both oppressive and negligent. Her survivalist parents raised her with very conservative Mormon beliefs, including the a subservient role for women in the home. What made this a strong 4 star read for me, was the author's journey of education and self realization. Having never heard of the Holocaust before college, Westover started her education at ground zero, absorbing volumes of history, politics, sociology, & religion. As her education progressed, she found herself at odds with her family's beliefs. She has gone through an incredible period of self realization having to choose between herself and her family. As with any memoir, this is one side of the story, and there are possibly some omissions and exaggerations. Westover tells this story with a very fragile voice. Her story is not over, and I look forward to hearing how it plays out. Thank you to #NetGalley for the arc. All opinions about #Educated are my own.

I love memoirs that allow you to be fully entrenched in someone's story. Westover's powerful and heart-wrenching book tells her story of growing up in a violent survivalist family who shunned any type of education. When she pushes to attend college, her and her family come apart at the seams. A truly inspirational, captivating, and moving story. Will definitely be recommending!

I’m torn about how to review this book. On one hand, I was fascinated by the author’s life growing up off the grid and how she spent her childhood. Her parents, mostly her dad, and his beliefs were interesting to read about. But then it turned to her going to college. And yes, she struggled a bit... but it glossed over much of her schooling to troubles with her family again. I guess I wanted to know why everyone considered her so brilliant that she got scholarships everywhere. I wanted a little less of the family drama and more about her education. 3.5 stars

5 Full Stars! I loved this book. There are so many layers to what this book is about. For me it had an interesting story of the authors insane childhood in Idaho. Then I reflected on the importance of education, she was successful without having any college readiness but still was very naive when she first left home. Of course there were many obstacles she had to overcome for success. It was great to see her have roommates that helped her grow, develop and acclimate to a "typical" college experience. The final thread throughout the book is her family's dynamics. I think this circled me back to the education, was her family not able to see her struggles to fit in with an abusive sibling due to the lack of experiences and education or was it mental illness? With her studies it had me feeling like a philosopher thinking and reflecting with her and her struggles. I highly recommend this book to non fiction lovers. It is one of the top memoirs I have read.

Educated is a fascinating memoir of a young woman in the midst of a soulful struggle between her family and herself. Tara Westover was raised by a "devout" Mormon father, who held firmly to certain "religious" beliefs that served to guide the lives of his children in some quite non-productive ways. In her education, both as a home school student, and later as a university student, Tara was forced to scrutinize what is right and what is wrong in the Mormon world that she was born into.

The book is well written, and Tara's story is compelling. I read it in record speed, as I couldn't wait to discover how she was able to get "Educated". I highly recommend it!

Not knowing my birthday had never seemed strange. I knew I'd been born near the end of September, and each year I picked a day, one that didn't fall on a Sunday because it's no fun spending your birthday in church..."I have a birthday, same as you," I wanted to tell [bureaucrats struggling to understand her lack of a birth certificate]. "It just changes. Don't you wish you could change your birthday?"

Tara Westover's memoir Educated has had a major impact in nonfiction these last weeks. If Fire and Fury was the nonfiction superstar of January, Educated is the It book for February. It made the rounds on lots of upcoming releases lists at the beginning of the year and was garnering tons of positive attention and reviews long before its February 20th release date two weeks ago. It's also drawn inevitable Glass Castle-comparisons, and I love that book so much, I couldn't imagine anything comparing. Until about the last third of this book, I thought it just might though.

I initially ignored Educated like I do anything delving too deeply into the university experience - it's fine if a story contains something about that for me and my interests, but I don't like reading too much on it, and I'm always turned off by Ivy League-worship. So I passed this one over initially. I somehow missed from the synopsis that Westover was raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family, which usually has me grabbing a copy as quickly as possible. In case if you're also misled by or uninterested in the educational aspect: it's more about the author's struggle to overcome a highly dysfunctional family background and accept knowledge and hard-won personal achievement over familial ties.

The gist is that Westover was raised off the grid, one of seven children of a charismatic but delusionally paranoid Mormon father and subservient mother, survivalists isolated on Buck Peak mountain in Idaho. Her father warned of the dangers of the government disagreeing with their ways of life and murdering them, like at Ruby Ridge, according to his preaching. If you've read other memoirs of children grown and gone from these type of families, maybe you already know what these stories entail. In brief - children forced to be adults too soon, neglect, doing dangerous work, religion and deference to God's will above all else.

The children don't attend school, not even homeschool - just Mormon Sunday school and Bible-reading, basically. They also don't receive any medical treatment for illnesses or injuries, have to work hard scrapping in their father's junkyard from early ages, or, additionally for Tara and her sister, helping their mother prepare essential oils and tinctures that she uses in her midwifery and homeopathic healing practices.

"There's a world out there," [her college-attending brother tells her.] "And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear."

Eventually, she follows the precedent set by an older brother who managed to get into Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City despite not even having been homeschooled (he and another brother would also go on to earn PhDs). She passes the ACT and earns herself a place at the college. From there, she has one of the most unbelievable but remarkably transformational fish out of water stories I've read in recent memory. If you think your adapting to college experience was hard, this'll put it in perspective.

And I do believe it, that's not in question at all - I just think that for all that she reveals, maybe some things are going unsaid. I felt like there were some steps missing between failing an algebra class and earning 100 on the final, between not knowing what a textbook was or how to use it and the thesis work she wrote at Cambridge. I know that's the whole point - and maybe I'm just cynical and not soft enough to let the whole lesson of this win me over. She did do it, and that's what matters, I just had a feeling I wasn't seeing everything. 

The constant struggle Tara engages in is that her two worlds become mutually exclusive. She can't be a worldly, thoughtful, educated and liberated woman while still maintaining ties to her fundamentalist, patriarchal, and outright delusional family. The core issue in the rift that opens with her family is the beatings, bone breakings, and various physical and mental abuses she and her sister suffered at the hands of one very troubled brother. Their parents, particularly their father, refuses to accept that this happened, or that the women understood what happened. 

There's a duality that's often at play as she considers what she remembers of certain experiences - some of it that she already knows as false - and uses that to question the veracity of other events. She pores over old journal entries and tries to cobble together narratives and reconcile who she was with who she's become, sometimes incorporating lines into her developing story and musing at how they've shown her something about her past self, often how they've influenced her growth somehow: "It's strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written."

There are other cracks and fissures in her relationship with the family and the way they operate that widen over time too, as would be expected leaving an environment such as that and building a life of the mind out in a world where more than one opinion or belief set is permitted.

...the paranoia and fundamentalism were carving up my life, how they were taking from me the people I cared about and leaving only degrees and certificates - an air of respectability - in their place.

I found the writing uneven - the first half to two-thirds had gorgeous storytelling and enveloping writing that swept me along completely. I read more than a hundred pages and felt like no time had passed. It's nearly unputdownable despite the tough topics. But the last third of the book fell apart somewhat for me - the writing felt less polished, and became more a recitation of events, a kind of timeline, as she shuttles back and forth between university and "home".

She has mental breakdowns, withdraws into herself, almost fails her PhD. Upon being awarded a visiting fellowship to Harvard, she observes of herself, "I knew I should be drunk with gratitude that I, an ignorant girl who'd crawled out of a scrap heap, should be allowed to study there, but I couldn't summon the fervor. I had begun to conceive of what my education might cost me, and I had begun to resent it."

Reviewing memoirs is so difficult, because it's allegedly what someone did, the choices they actually made and what realistically transpired - not bad plot turns in a novel. But this litany of returns to Buck Peak, seemingly on every holiday or school break, felt extremely frustrating and tiring. Her pull to her family and her roots is strong and understandable -- part of the book is about redefining her own personhood for herself, but it became uncomfortable, at some point, to read about each return with its impending sense of doom.

And ultimately, I was bothered because I feel sad for her - her pain jumps off the page, even when she writes about it metaphorically or indirectly, as I thought became more common in the book's final section. She's cut ties with those family members who refused to acknowledge the truth of what she and her sister suffered, the reality of what's wrong within their isolated community, and how accidents and injury have harmed them physically and mentally in addition to the untruths and pain they've purposely inflicted on each other. But she kept returning, she kept acquiescing to certain conditions. And even if she's drawn that line now, it's clear that she hasn't closed the door in the estrangement completely, there

I agree with the buzz to great extent - this is a powerful, page-turning book and Tara's journey and accomplishments are magnificent. She has every reason to be proud of herself and similarly every reason not to keep looking back over her shoulder at where she came from. It's hard to accept that you're not going to have your family's love and approval if you live your life the way you've chosen, but I hope she's, if not already there, then close to a place where that's ok for her.

I remembered attending [a lecture] which...had begun by writing, "Who writes history?" on the blackboard. I remembered how strange the question had seemed to me then. My idea of a historian was not human; it was of someone like my father, more prophet than man, whose visions of the past, like those of the future, could not be questioned, or even augmented. Now, as I passed through King's College, in the shadow of the enormous chapel, my old diffidence seemed almost funny. Who writes history? I thought. I do.