First, let me say that Tara Westover is a brilliant storyteller. I was engrossed in this book by the third sentence. It's a memoir of her life growing up in a secluded part of Idaho with her large family as they prepare for the end of days. Specifically, her strictly religious father believes the world will implode on Y2K and they spend their days stockpiling weapons, food, silver (instead of cash) and herbal remedies. He insists that the family lives off the grid, not allowing the children to attend school or go to the doctor, the younger of the children don't even have birth certificates since they were born at home. Where this book fell short for me, was when Tara grows up attends BYU. I find it a bit difficult to believe that someone who never had any formal education could get admitted to a college or university, but she did. This last quarter of this book just felt disjointed and things didn't add up for me. *ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

tara westover has written a haunting memoir that i could barely put down. her experiences growing up in her father’s house was unbelievable. her spirit and determination to survive and thrive despite the circumstances.

I have put off reviewing this book because I couldn't quite decide how I felt about it. I found it to be a quick, engrossing read and that seems to be the popular opinion both here and on goodreads. What has me struggling to write this review is that I felt myself questioning a lot of things in the book and wondering if details were exaggerated or made up. This is not meant to take away from Tara Westover's experience or story because I did truly find her story compelling but there were some elements that I just found hard to wrap my mind around. I will say that this book is a good but hard read. The images and descriptions of emotional and physical abuse were hard to read and a lot to process. I found myself putting the book down to process and then coming back. I think this is worth the read and would recommend it to others.

A heartbreaking, yet uplifting memoir. A young Mormon girl who is deprived of education and a safe home is able to eventually get a doctorate at Harvard. The story is hard to read, but mezmerizing. The abuse she endures at the hands of family members is unbelievable.

Some reviewers have criticized this memoir for not being believable, but I think that is an unfair accusation. Some people just do live extraordinary lives - Westover is one of them. She tells the story of her life as she remembers it. She recalls events in a vivid way, describing her feelings at the time as well as reflecting on it as an adult, with a newfound distance from the cult she was raised in.

Westover does an amazing and honest job of describing the abuse and neglect she suffered as a child - but in an understanding and forgiving way. This is the part that feels real to me - how she gradually pieces together why her parents acted the way they did and making sense of her upbringing. She is a true survivor who has gone on to live a wonderful life.

Thank you to Westover for sharing her story and to Netgalley and the publisher for the galley in return for an honest review.

A fantastic memoir from beginning to end. Tough to read at parts, but man, what a story. To think that someone could make it through life without even knowing what the Holocaust was? It just goes to show that you never know someone's story.

This is the most gripping, emotionally engaging memoir I have ever read. The writing was so good and word choices so precise that I had to remind myself that this was nonfiction. I loved it! I will be recommending this to my book club for discussion.

WOW, this book was amazing. I still have trouble believing this was a true story. Tara Westover's family lives in a hidden world and there story will amaze you!

Wow! What a powerful book! Tara’s gut wrenching story was certainly a page turner from beginning to end.

An amazing story of a young woman who overcame the odds to better herself. I learned so much in this book about the power of believing in yourself and perservance.

“This is not a story about being Mormon,” writes New York Times Bestselling author Tara Westover, at the start of Educated, a book that has been compared to narratives about cults. I’ll admit that I was intrigued initially, based on this description, but I was quickly won over by Westover’s candid and heartfelt account of her experience growing up in the mountains as part of a fundamentalist Mormon family. Readers who love a good, gritty memoir packed with excitement and a narrator that you can’t help but root for will love Educated.

Family Values

There were many elements of Tara Westover’s life that shocked and surprised me, to the point that I couldn’t set down the book, because I just had to know what would happen. The many visceral descriptions of abuse and other frightening moments in Westover’s life were fascinating to read about, but what stuck out as the most dynamic parts of the story were not her “escape” into more “mainstream” culture, but the relationships that she had with her family.

Even though Westover lives through some truly terrible moments at the hands of her older brother Shawn and her bipolar father, the view that she creates of her family feels balanced. No one is ever quite a villain in this piece, which makes them all the more endearing to read about. I think it is because she includes such tender, honest moments between these characters that they are made human in the readers’ eyes. Because I felt that Westover loved her family despite their flaws, I found myself loving them too.

A College Narrative with a Twist

Maybe it is because I went on to post-secondary education that I was attracted to the descriptions of Tara at College, but I liked reading about her experiences there. This section of the book had some particularly excellent tension, as I was constantly wondering how she would pass courses that required knowledge Tara did not have based on her lack of a high school education, or how she would pay for another semester when she was too broke to eat.

Even more fascinating was Tara’s point of view as a strict Mormon living for the first time with “gentiles.” It was a unique perspective to view and I found that while the earlier scenes featuring her family (and the many times that Tara was put in dangerous situations), this section had its own revelations that kept me turning the pages. I loved reading about her gentile roommates, who had to remind her to wash her hands, or the moment in a lecture where she didn’t know who Hitler was. Reading this section gave me a clearer sense of Westover’s struggle.

Read This Book

Deeply moving, raw and wild like the mountain that she hails from, Tara Westover’s Educated is a narrative that you won’t want to miss. I may have come for the sensational story about escape from a survivalist family, but I found that I never wanted to leave.

This book was so violent and gave off such an air of desperation that it was sometimes hard to read. I'm glad I did, but I couldn't believe she stayed with her family for so long. I liked this book as a tale of overcoming such great odds but I wish she had talked more about leaving (or not?) her faith and some of the relationships she left behind with her friends from college.

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” —Maya Angelou.
As I finished Educated, this quote above by Maya Angelou comes to mind.
Educated documents a woman's journey from an abusive highly dysfunctional family in Idaho to a place far far away from it with a PhD from Cambridge. Education being the vehicle of escape.
Tara Westover has done open heart surgery on herself in order to write this difficult to read and amazing story of her life. This book is probably one of the most difficult books I have read in a long time yet it was also difficult to put down.
Tara's story can be simply boiled down to a story of abuse and mental illness but I also find it impossible to ignore the effect of the Mormon religion/cult on this dysfunctional family. She says at the opening of the book, almost as an apology, that she does not intend her memoir to be about Mormonism or any other kind of religion. She wants it to be about the people, good and bad. So, if we put the religion/cult aside, Tara survived a childhood without a birth certificate, modern medicine, vaccines, school, safety ... and with violence, physical and mental abuse, crazy "end of the world" and "the government is coming to get us" conspiracy theories and mentally ill father and brain damaged mother. WOW! How can anyone come out of this?
I am in awe of Tara Westover for what she has accomplished in spite of these circumstances. My heart broke every time she crawled out a little bit in search of herself only to be pulled back in as she yearned for the love and acceptance of her crazy parents and also the cultist indoctrination of her religion.
There is so much here in this memoir to think about and relate to. I was fortunate enough to come from a loving caring family but this book had me thinking about my parents and how would I have known as a child what was abuse? As children, we only know what is normal to us. Tara lived in isolation with her family in a mountain in the middle of nowhere Idaho.
I recommend this book highly and I think this will be in the best of 2018. It is in my "best of 2018" bookshelf.

I was interested in reading Educated because of the subject of this book- the idea that a girl had never stepped into a classroom until the age of 17, and then went on to earn a doctorate at Cambridge. I knew part of the story was about her upbringing and the violence and abuse she suffered, but I expected the other part to be more about her education. The title of the book had more to do about what it took for her to throw off the brainwashing and about her having to negotiate the loss of her family. Her 'education' was about learning to be okay with who she is, even if it means she can't have her family. I recommend this book to people who are interested in the family dynamics and peculiar upbringing she had more than to someone who wants to read more about being educated after having received little to no schooling.

"An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University.

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 metal in her father’s junkyard.

Her father distrusted the medical establishment, 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 an older brother became violent.

When another brother got himself into college and came back with news of the world beyond the mountain, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. She taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. There, she studied psychology, politics, philosophy, and history, learning for the first time about pivotal 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 University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.

Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes from severing ties with those closest to you. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it."

This sounds fascinating if just for the fact Tara has lived the exact opposite life I have.

This memoir is truly quite gobsmacking. Tara Westover is raised by parents who have an abundance of strange, one could well say crackpot beliefs. They believed the government was coming after them, they discounted all western medicine, they believed the “state” to be evil and the school system to be unnecessary and to be avoided at all costs. The result of this was that Tara and her siblings were indoctrinated with fear and suspicion and remained completely ignorant of even basic schooling and knowledge of the outside world. How the author triumphed over this to eventually earn a PhD from some of the world’s best schools is truly amazing. Her story is compelling and her writing is great. This is a memoir not to be missed.
My thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an arc in exchange for my honest review.

Beautifully written! The author has such a way of painting a picture that I was hooked from the first page. I enjoyed watching her build her strength and I cheered for her along the way. So many of her stories were hard to read and harder to believe. An awe-inspiring story of a woman finding her way despite the obstacles both real and imagined.

In her memoir, debut author Tara Westover brings readers along on her journey from her childhood as “an ignorant girl who’d crawled out of a scrap heap” to the upper echelons of academia. She grew up on a mountain in rural Idaho called Buck’s Peak, the youngest of seven children in a family headed by her survivalist father and midwife mother. Her parents were so dedicated to staying off the grid that their younger children had no birth certificates, no visits to the doctor (despite several severe injuries), and no formal schooling. Tara’s homeschooling experience was unstructured at best, and she spent most of her childhood lending a hand at her father’s scrapyard. Eager to escape an abusive older brother, Tara began to eye college as a possible route to a different kind of life. After four years at Brigham Young University, where she often felt like a fish-out-of-water, Tara began graduate studies at Cambridge in England. Through education, her worldview expanded exponentially: “I felt an animating surge of adrenaline, of possibility, of a frontier being pushed outward.” Tara Westover is a gifted writer, vividly depicting her early years on Buck’s Peak, her adolescence, and her journey into a future that is different from her past. She also takes a loving, nonjudgmental approach in portraying her extremist parents, even as she rejects the pain and violence associated with their way of life. Educated is a must-have for every library’s biography section!

this hit memoir was nice in it's angle: the author's intellectual journey related to her own personal fight for an education - from school basics to grad school

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Highly recommended read! Thanks for providing through Net Galley. Five Stars *****