The Memoir, Educated by Tara Westover covers the arc of her life. You may ask yourself what kind of memoir that ends as the author comes into her thirties be worth the read? perhaps it is that she was raised by parents that birthed her at home, never saw a doctor, attended a school, and worked in the family junk yard until she was seventeen. She was "Homeschooled." He survivalist father did not believe in public schools. They were Government brainwashing. Doctors were part of the Illuminati. Tara Westover writes that she was "educated in the rhythms of the mountain" she grew up near. The mountain was a peak in Idaho, Buck Peak, that held "the impression of a woman's body on the mountains face... her father called her the "Indian Princess" It was this place that formed her being and the world she would know built upon the stories her father told. What happens when a family breaks from society? It is the stuff of fiction novels. Her family, Father, mother, brothers and sisters - they were in this together - preparing for the Days of Abomination. However, this story was not fiction, it was her reality.

This story begins with a memory, she was seven years old. She tells us at seven she did not exist. She didn't know it at the time, but according to the government, she actually didn't exist. She had no birth certificate or social security number, no piece of paper or database to prove she did exist. So in reality, according to Idaho and the U.S. Government, there was no seven year-old Tara Westover. The same was true of four of the seven children in the home. When Tara needs to get a birth certificate, a delayed certificate, at 9 or 10 her parents are not actually sure of her birthdate. Later when she needs a passport, she is unable to have one issued as she cannot confirm her birthdate and the government cannot issue without some verification she is really Tara or that a Tara was ever born.

“I understood that it was this fact, more than any other, that made my family different: we didn’t go to school.”
— Educated

This amazing memoir will make you angry at times. It is hard to read some of the lengths her parents took to maintain their off the grid lifestyle. They made a living working a junk yard scraping metal and later her mother would become a mid-wife, unlicensed of course. Her older brothers that had gone to school for a few years, would leave the home and go off to make a living. One would actually go to College. This brother convinced Tara, the youngest in the family, that all she needed to do was pass the ACT test with a 26 and she could go. She would just have to teach herself how to with the ACT work book. And so she does.
She passes the ACT and at 17 she walks into a classroom for the first time in her life attending Brigham Young University and within 10 years of first stepping into that classroom

Tara Westover attains her PhD in intellectual history and political thought from Cambridge University. From age 7 and into her late 20's we carried on an unvarnished tour of how a person can overcome all of the trauma and in some ways because of it. How she overcame her father protecting her from the "Brainwashing" world, the "Feds" who were certainly going to invade their homestead and kill them all, and Doctors who would fill them with poison and despite all her fathers truths, Tara Westover succeeded. She Succeeded due to a fierceness and toughness built into her out of necessity.

It can be brutal, this memoir, it is told in a quick pace of writing and she is a heck of a story-teller. Tara Westover holds you even when at times you may want to put it down. However you don't, because you know the author has made it through to tell the tale. She has overcome the circumstances at the cost of all she knew and held dear as a child. She lost her family, home and the Indian Princess, the Peak her father taught her how to survive on, but never how to cope or live outside the Indian Princess' shadow, nor how to find her way back if she left. And this too is part of the story of Educated - A brilliant Memoir.

I would like to thank Random House Publishing Group - Random House and Tara Westover for the opportunity to read this work through NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Wow, what an incredible read. I was mesmerised by Tara Westover’s story and absolutely devoured this book. Tara is an amazing young woman who emerged from an uneducated, physically hard and often abusive childhood not as a damaged victim, but as an educated doctor of history with a strong sense of who she is.
Tara grew up in Idaho, the youngest of seven children of survivalist Mormon parents who didn’t trust doctors, the schooling system or the government (called the Illuminati by her father). Home schooling was abandoned after a vague attempt and Tara ends up working for her fundamentalist father in his junkyard. He is by turns cruel, tender, abusive and paranoid. Apart from her demanding and often dangerous job, Tara helps her mother with her herbalism and packs peaches for their post-apocalypse bunker. One of her brothers becomes deeply disturbed, violent and abusive, causing Tara deep emotional scars, guilt and self-doubt. At 17, she decides to go to college, against her parent’s wishes and beliefs. There she discovers learning – and starts to explore a world she never knew existed. So successful is she that she’s accepted on a short programme to study at Cambridge, where it becomes even more obvious to her how much she doesn’t know and how distorted her family’s beliefs have made her thinking. Her first relationship fails as she cannot bring herself to tell Nick about her family. How could she admit that when her father is seriously injured in a junkyard accident that hospital is never an option, and that he is treated at home by his mother? Instead of giving in to her parents and her background, Tara decides to take control of her life by becoming educated and questioning everything she’d been taught to believe. At the time of writing, she had been awarded a PhD in history from Cambridge.
This book is beautifully written and totally compelling. A must read.

I really loved reading this book by Tara Westover about growing up in a family of survivalists. Her father has a junkyard and preaches end-of-days, her mother is a midwife and does healing work, selling herbs and tinctures. They hoard food like peaches and things from their garden and can it, stockpiling it for when the end comes. They try to live totally off the grid with the kids being homeschooled or self-schooled. The brothers are a very different bunch altogether. A recommended read for those who like non-fiction.
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An advance digital copy was provided by NetGalley, Tara Westover, and Random House Publishing Group for my honest review. Publication date is Feb. 20, 2018.

It was hard for me to decide how to rate this book overall. For the first 75% of the book, I found it very difficult to read of Tara's life and the upbringing that she experienced. There are really hard passages to read, but I think it also really helps you appreciate what Tara has done with her life. God bless her drive and ambition to get education and make a life for herself!. She overcame a lot, while struggling with the need to be loyal to her family, and has made a great future ahead.

Educated by Tara Westover is her memoir of growing up in Idaho as a Mormon with a mentally ill father, a delusional mother, and an abusive brother. I found the story to be compelling and shocking as she describes how she challenged her family, beliefs, and instincts to educate herself. She used her curiosity to learn more than her immediate world on her family's farm to see how she defines herself in the world. I was amazed of how her family lied and manipulated their views to match her father's views for the sake of sanity and survival. As a teacher and an educated woman, I could relate to her struggles and triumphs because every woman wrestles with the balance of motherhood and family and finding herself as an individual in this world. I highly recommend this memoir and thank you Netgalley for allowing me to read this arc.

A very high 4 stars.

Educated is a powerful and heartbreaking memoir. Tara Westover grew up in Idaho in a Mormon family. She is the youngest of seven children growing up on an isolated rural property. A fundamentalist version of religion fed her father’s paranoia and his antigovernment and survivalist view of the world. Until she was 17 years old, she had never gone to school and was barely homeschooled. Clearly brilliant, she managed to get into college at Brigham Young and eventually made her way to Cambridge University in the UK.

Westover’s memoir focuses on her family and their influence over her life and her understanding of the world. There was love in her home life, but it came at a ridiculously high price — intellectual, emotional and physical. (As just one example, there are a few harrowing scenes of physical injuries that her parents were unwilling to treat with the use of conventional medicine). Once she starts separating from her family, there was so much to learn about people, history and politics that had previously been filtered through her father’s paranoid view of the world. While Westover clearly values her ability to get an education and learn about the world, the consequential separation from her family also came at its own high price.

Educated is an emotional roller coaster— but it’s not told with melodrama or self pity. Well worth the read. Westover wrote this memoir in her late 20s. I suspect that the story she has to tell is not over.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read an advance copy.

"They believed in modesty; we practiced it. They believed in God's power to heal; we left our injuries in God's hands. They believed in preparing for the Second Coming; we were actually prepared."

Even in a rural, religious Mormon town in Iowa, the Westover family was different. They didn't go to school. Tara Westover's father believed school would take his children off their Godly path, which included helping out in the family metal scrap yard and forgoing the doctor in favor essential oils and herbs. And because he took no safety precaution at his junk yard, his children were injured a lot. Growing up, Tara didn't think there was anything wrong with the way her family lived. But as she got older, she started to question. At seventeen, she enrolled in BYU, and it was like landing on a different planet. It took years to deprogram herself from her father's brainwashing.

Despite the title, education is the least of Tara's story. For years, she suffered savage abuse at the hands of her older brother, Shawn. On more than one occasion, he threatens to kill her, and her parents take his side. There's an element of reading this that's like reading a horror story, where you're screaming at the girl not to open the basement door. For whatever reason, Tara keeps going home. Home to abuse from her brother, home to the junk yard that almost kills her, home to brainwashing from her father, home to backstabbing from her mother. I wanted to scream.

For this reason and others, I didn't connect with Tara Westover the way I have with other authors of so-called "misery lit"-- and I've read a lot of these memoirs. Tara writes in euphemism and hints, unable or unwilling to deal with the issue of abuse in frank terms. It's a hold over from a coping mechanism she used as a child writing in her diary. Until the end of the book, Tara wonders if she really is possessed by the devil, and desires to be awash in her father's cult once again. I don't think she is healed enough to write this book. I won't be surprised to learn in five years that she is back on the family compound in Idaho, making essential oil concoctions.

Difficult to read. Impossible to put down. A powerful, powerful book that you shouldn’t miss. I can’t just leave it at that because Tara Westover’s story deserves more than those few words. I don’t often read memoirs, but when I do I want them to be told by extraordinary people who have a meaningful story to tell and that would be faint praise for this book. It sounds odd to say how beautifully written this is because we are not spared of the ugly details of what this family was about, but yet it is beautifully written. I had to remind myself at times that I wasn’t reading a gritty novel, that Tara and her family were real as I got more than just a glimpse of a life that was hard for me to even imagine.

A religious fanatic father, hoarding food and guns and bullets and keeping his family off the radar, not filing for birth certificates, not getting medical attention when they needed it, avoiding the government, the feds at all cost , keeping his children out of school, the paranoia, the preparation for the “Days of Abomination” - this is what we find in this place on a mountain in Idaho. There are horrible accidents and he won’t get medical help for his family. Her mother’s healing herbs and tinctures are used to treat the slightest scrape to the most horrible head injury or burns from gasoline to an explosion. If some thing bad happens it because that’s the will of the Lord. Her mother seems at times more sympathetic to her children, but she is complicit by her subservience to her husband. I don’t even know how to describe it other than gut wrenching to see the effects on this family of neglect in the name of religious beliefs and in reality mental illness. It isn’t just her father but the brutality by one of her brother’s which is more than awful and creates rifts between family members,

That she was bold enough and somehow found the will to rise above it all while she is torn with the sense of duty, of loyalty to her family, the ingrained beliefs, still loving her family is miraculous. Going to college was the first time she’d been in a classroom, not knowing what the Holocaust was, learning about slavery, the depression, WWII, the civil rights movement. She doesn’t just get a college education but ultimately a PhD from Cambridge, a Harvard fellowship. She struggles for years to discover who she was, who she could be - a scholar, a writer, an independent woman. This is a stunning, awe inspiring story that will haunt the reader long after the book ends.

Thank you to Tara Westover for sharing yourself with us. I received an advanced copy of this book from Random House through NetGalley. Thanks to my friend Diane for bringing this book to my attention. Without her review I might have missed this.

This may be the best book of its nature I was still able to finish. There are possibly more harrowing and disturbing memoirs of the way people have been raised, but I know myself well enough to know that I would never get through reading them. Trigger warning for extreme physical and psychological cruelty, brought on by untreated mental illness and extremist religious and political beliefs.

This book should have been called "Gaslighted." It was indescribably shocking to see how brainwashed by her family the author Tara Westover became after a childhood of torture by her father and brother, and denial by other siblings that the events she described ever happened (or if proof was undeniable, such as some of the physical injury which left scars and marks, that they happened in the factual manner described by Westover.) I still cannot believe no one died prematurely given the family's strong opposition to medical intervention, even in the event of very serious injury.

It was almost hard to share joy in the author's escape and triumph, given the level of psychological damage that persists in her adulthood. It is amazing that someone with no formal schooling was able to be competitive to study at Cambridge and Harvard, and ultimately earn her Ph.D. But what should have been exhilarating was almost as painful to read as the tales of abuse while she still lived at home.

All of it was just so wrong, and if you ever wanted to see the damage wrought by either untreated mental illness or extreme and insular religious views (I cannot even indict Mormonism here, because what the Westovers practiced was so far beyond mainstream Mormonism as to be almost unrelated) then you might find this fascinating. It's insanely well-written, to be sure. But as I go to sleep, I'm really hoping I don't have nightmares as a result of reading this book. I give it 5 stars even though it's hard to recommend unless you like this sort of carnage or feel emotionally prepared to tackle it.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Excellent memoir of an emotionally brutal, yet exceptionally brilliant, family. I am glad Tara excaped, and especially glad that she has the support of some of her siblings.

Tara Westover has opened her life to us in this memoir. And that’s a good thing, for both her and her readers. I felt a range of emotions reading this book, including fear, anger, hope, vindication, disgust, wonder, gratitude, and in the end, redemption. I identfied strongly with one or two of the themes (namely, the redemptive power of education, and the conflicted emotions of rejecting a family member who is toxic to you yet whom you still want to love and honor). Yet others were hard for me to relate to.

I recognized at a very early age the value of knowledge, education, and raw intelligence, and this book serves to verbalize the feelings I’ve always had about them. What makes this book important is its message that an education is available to even the most unlikely suspects. Poverty, misfortune, abuse, bad parenting, and many other conditions can be overcome through education.

This book invites reflection, and sensitivity to the people and relationships we encounter every day. I will recommend it far and wide.

"Vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one's own wretchedness."

"I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it meant to self-create."

I've recently been on a nonfiction kick, and have especially enjoyed memoirs like Glass Castle. Although not as artistically expressed as Glass Castle, the content of Educated was still mesmerizing. Seeing how other people grew up has become one of my recent fascinations, and Westover's childhood was anything but normal. Born into a Mormon survivalist family, the author grows up with a taught distrust of the government and modern medicine. Her mother is an unlicensed midwife and her father a doomsday "prepper." Tara does not receive a formal education until she first enters a classroom at age seventeen, and when she does, she is shocked at what her parents failed to tell her about the world and its history.

I enjoyed this book because the author overcomes so many setbacks to eventually earn a PhD: a crazy family, physical abuse, brainwashing, a lack of education, and her own personal demons. The journey is not easy, but she slowly learns to evaluate things for herself, including religion and the beliefs she was taught as a child. This book is for anyone who believes in the pursuit of knowledge and freedom of thought, no matter your upbringing or setbacks.

This memoir was chock-full of fantastic quotes about self-worth, finding your voice, and seeking truth. Here are a few other quotes that really resonated with me:

"The most powerful determination of who you are is inside you . . . this is Pygmalion . . . She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn't matter what dress she wore."

"You are not fool's gold, shining under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you . . . You are gold."

"My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs."

"I would never again allow myself to be made a foot soldier in a conflict I didn't understand."

I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This book deserves all the buzz it's getting pre-publication. It is a gut-wrenching memoir of a woman who was raised in near-isolation with her siblings by her Mormon/survivalist parents. The kids were kept out of school and didn't "trust" or seek medical care for even the most horrific injuries. This memoir touches on religious zealotry, undiagnosed mental health and the power of the family dynamic which can define you or help you achieve despite where you came from.

When I first heard of this book, I was intrigued by the memoir of a girl from a Mormon Fundamentalist, survivalist family "escaping" her family and their lifestyle. I was then surprised by Westover's author note stating the book is not about Mormonism. This note was confirmed while I was reading and not focused on the religious aspects but on the manipulation, mental illness and abuse that seems to plague Westover's family.
Westover's story is about growth and heartbreak, not about solely the religion her family devotes itself to. I found her writing honest, at times a little disjointed, but overall was mesmerize by her story and the path her life is taking. I craved a little more detail about what her life currently looks and because of that, the book felt a little unfinished to me.

Let's get right down to it: I think this book is going to haunt me for a while. If any of your triggers are child abuse or physical/mental abuse, brace yourself if you want to read this book. There's a good chunk of this book that deals with that. I didn't think any of those things triggered me, (they normally don't) but here I am. I have not experienced anything near what the author went through but there were certain parts that felt too familiar. The silence of what's really going on in the home was what struck me in the heart and made me run to my beloved Sherlock Holmes every night after I finished a few chapters. I read some tweets from other people saying they read half or more of this book in a day. Wow. Yes, Educated is very well-written but certain sections were too much for me to read all in one sitting. All that being said, I have already recommended this book to two of my friends.

Synopsis (Goodreads):
Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills bag.” In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father’s junkyard.

Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent.

Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

I am going to try not to give any spoilers here but it's going to be difficult when talking about Tara and her dad. Saying they have a complicated relationship would be an understatement. He believes completely in the Mormon faith and he is quite the doomsday prepper. I had an uncle who, during Y2K, thought the world was going to end, so he stocked up on rice and bottled water. Tara's dad collects guns, fuel, and has the family make and can their own food. Tara's dad is so sure the world is going to end that when Y2K doesn't happen, he is upset and so is Tara in a way because her dad has this intense energy when he is on an end-of-the-world rant. And remember, this is all Tara has ever known, so she is all for it. Or at least for the first half of the book. She comes to realize she wants to learn; she craves it like candy. Her dad is okay with her learning, but when she starts to talk about other truths that her father and most of her family don't want to own up to, most of them quickly disown her. Luckily, she is not living with her parents when this happens, but it's still heartbreaking in a way. Despite her parent's never sending her to school, her father's temper, and the abuse she suffered, she loves her parents and because it hurts her that her father is disowning her, it hurts the reader too.

Tara and her mom's relationship is more complicated than it seems on the surface. Tara's mom reluctantly becomes a midwife when Tara is relatively young. I wouldn't say her husband forces her into it but circumstances come about where she is the only option for much of the Mormon community where they live. Tara respects her mother for doing this work even while knowing it's not what she wants to do. It mirrors Tara's own work in the junkyard with her father and brothers. She doesn't want to do it, but she doesn't want to put up with the fuss it would cause if she flat-out refused. Tara's mother is also the caregiver for the entire family and eventually most of the neighborhood (if you can call living at the base of a mountain a neighborhood :) ). She makes her own medicine from different plants and oils. Whenever anyone is hurt (and I mean like bleeding profusely), Tara's mom is the one that is called on to help fix them. She eventually starts and runs a wildly successful business selling her healing tonics and potions. But where we really get to see and understand Tara's mother's mind is when Tara starts to talk about the abuse she has gone through. Tara and her mother have a conversation over email about it and Tara thinks she finally has made her mother understand. Understand how bad Tara's father is (he's bipolar) and how bad the abuse was. But she comes to find out her mother is very good at playing to the audience of whoever she's speaking to. I won't say much more because that would be a major spoiler, but it was probably one of the more shocking parts of the book for me.

Okay, now for the rougher parts. One of Tara's older brothers is named Shawn. At first, I thought he was the sweet one. The one I was going to love. He just seemed to treat young Tara with so much care. I was wrong. Shawn repeatedly physically abuses Tara. Like I said in the intro, there is a section of this book that almost made me stop reading because the abuse didn't stop and nothing was being done about it. None of it is written graphically, but apparently, I am more sensitive to it than I originally thought. It is hard to look back on this book and think about Shawn and not think about only the abuse. Especially when we learn later in the book how much Shawn's verbal abuse becomes ingrained in the way Tara thinks about herself.

Tara and Tyler's relationship is a whole other story. Tyler is one of the siblings who leaves the house and moves away. He goes off to get his education and although it was definitely Tara who made the decision to go off to school, she also had Tyler as a role model. One of my favorite parts of the entire book is when Tyler initially leaves to go to college and Tara is pissed at him. She doesn't understand yet why someone would want to leave their family. Remember, she has been taught that school is not important, that the teachers are there to brainwash you and that it's run by socialists (and that's a bad thing lol). I like this little section because after you read the whole book, you get to see how much Tara has grown and developed since that angry young kid. Tyler is also the first person from her family to believe everything she says about how bad it is with her parents and Shawn. She thinks her entire family is going to be against her, but Tyler proves her wrong. 

Now I want to get into Tara's experiences once she finally does get out of the house and begins going to school. She learns very quickly how much she doesn't know. She has a very embarrassing moment early on where she raises her hand and asks what the Holocaust is. She was never taught that at home, so how would she know. But instead of being indignant when people look at her strangely, she works to learn, to know as much as any other student there. Her hunger for learning and grabbing every bit of information she can is beautiful. I do the same thing when I see or hear about a part of history I wasn't taught in school. 

Tara also does quite a bit of traveling in the time that is covered in the book.  She ends up at Cambridge for a study abroad program and seeing the school through her eyes (and words) is incredible. I have never been to Cambridge, let alone Europe, but the way she described it and the feelings she showed made me feel like I was there too. Each new place she goes is like she is discovering a new planet almost. It is fun to be with her along the way.

The parts of Educated that I will probably take from the most is when Tara speaks about forgiving and letting go of her home and her family. Forgiveness is something I struggle with and something I have been trying to get better at over the past year. Reading her thoughts about letting go of her anger at her family really impacted me. She forgives them for herself, not for them.  I like to think I have cut the emotional ties between myself and certain people who have hurt me, but I am not sure that is always true. I wonder what forgiveness would look like in my situation. I wonder if I would feel the same relief and calm Tara seems to feel once she lets go of parts of her family. She has to give up the home she lived in for so long so that she can finally move on.

And one last small thing, although it is an image that is shown multiple times throughout the book. Tara and her family live at the base of a mountain called Buck Peak. There are a few moments where Tara looks at the mountain and sees the image of a woman. The woman is made of the ravines and pine trees covering the mountain. She is strong and powerful (or at least Tara sees her that way). It is a great moment of foreshadowing of the woman Tara becomes, of what she has to become to finally take control of her life.

Needless to say, I enjoyed this book. Educated is a bumpy ride but I am glad I went on it. I am giving this book 4 out of 5 stars. It is very well-written and every person (even the ones you might perceive as villains) are given so much depth. I loved seeing Tara's experience of college and traveling the world through her own eyes. The sections that covered the abuse she went through were rough, but I'm glad I ultimately pushed through them to get to the end.

Educated by Tara Westover comes out February 20, 2018.

Thank you, NetGalley and Random House for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I'm about to recommend this to a friend of mine who grew up in very similar circumstances. Not so bad as Tara describes, but bad enough. It's hard for me to read stuff like this but it's vital for people like Tara to tell their stories.

I was not home schooled, but I am a proponent of home schooling. I think that it permits children to have more personal attention than being stuffed into a classroom of 35 children, as I was in eighth grade in one of the best school districts in America. I think Tara demonstrates how dangerous it can be for people to be homeschooled and held back from reality. It's really, really hard for me to read this.

Breaking attachments to the only people and home you’ve ever known is hard. Even when you know you don’t have any other choice. Tara Westover knew what her future looked like if she stayed living in the shadow of Buck’s Peak in Southern Idaho. She would marry young, learn herbal healing and midwifery from her mother, and would always be under her father’s influence. When one of her five brothers leaves home to attend college, she begins to see a way out.

“It’s time to go Tara,” Tyler said. “The longer you stay, the less likely you will ever leave.” “You think I need to leave?” Tyler didn’t blink, didn’t hesitate. “I think this is the worst possible place for you.” He’d spoken softly, but it felt as though he’d shouted the words.”

Part One of Educated covers Tara’s childhood – the people and events that shaped her. She does not spare us the details of graphic abuse at the hands of one of her brothers or the horrifying injuries received by family members in accidents in the junkyard or while driving unlicensed, uninsured vehicles. Her father’s distrust of the medical establishment often prevents family members from receiving the treatment and care they need.

Tara recounts her mother’s efforts to homeschool the children and how her father subverted her efforts by grabbing the boys to work in the junkyard whenever he had the chance. Her mother eventually decides reading is the only schooling they need.

Part Two begins with Tara’s new life at Brigham Young University. Her incredible lack of knowledge about the world around her was heartbreaking. She wrestles with wanting to learn and how each new bit of knowledge contradicts what she learned from her Dad.

I was struck by her always referring to her parents as Mother and Dad. To me, Mother was always more formal and Dad makes me think of someone more loving and gentle. While neither of her parents seemed warm and fuzzy, I thought her mother showed more kindness and caring. It just strikes me as odd that a man as imposing and domineering as her father was referred to by the more lovable term.

Tara’s writing is beautiful. This is one of may favorite books so far this year and will stay with me for a very long time. She took hold of me from the very beginning with her description of the wheat fields at the base of the mountain. They made me think of the farm of my Mom’s family in Northern Idaho.

The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind.”

Wow!! This book is incredible!! Tara Westover has such a way with words that she pulls you into her world immediately, and her memoir reads like a novel, without ever losing sight of the fact that Educated is real life, her real life.

Tara Westover was born into a Mormon family in Idaho, and grew up what would be considered as “off the grid”. While religion, or maybe fanaticism, are an overall part of Tara’s childhood, it’s not the main focus of the story. Tara’s father believes in stories of the Illuminati and the dangers of government involvement as well as being a fervent believer of the Mormon teachings (which I am not familiar enough with to even start talking about), and leads his family to live a very unconventional life... One where the children don’t receive a formal education in school. It’s so much more complex than this though, and as I don’t want to spoil this amazing book for anyone I will stop there with the background.

Tara’s memoir takes you back through her childhood through her own eyes. We, the readers, are 6 when she is 6, we are 12 when she is 12. We are there with her, living with her. I could literally smell the mountain air of Buck Peak, feel the snow under my feet, and the force of some of the things that she endured shook me to the core. Educated is not an easy read, there are moments when you need to put the book down and look at something pretty and sparkly, or cuddle someone you love. There are moments when I burst into tears, and others where I had to skip over a scene because I was scared how it might affect me mentally. Tara’s strength is incredible, because she went from literally having no education whatsoever to putting herself through college, then several universities. And her family dynamic is so deep and scary that your logic is telling her to run as fast as she can away from it all, but your heart understands what pulls her back.

Educated will be released on February 20th through Random House and I recommend getting it as soon as you can. I think it’s going to be on my mind for a very long time.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance galley!

Fascinating, horrifying, inspiring and sad. I ran through the gamut of emotions reading Tara's story. I'm looking forward to recommending it to library patrons.