Educated by Tara Westover

Paperback, 384 pages

Published November 1st 2018 by Windmill Books 

Memoir

Library

I am a bit torn when it comes to this book. I was really bored by page 40 and gave up for some time, then I read a bit more because I had chosen this for my book club. Then I finished it so I would have something to talk about.

But did I like it? Eh. It had good points and low points. I did feel the author was too detached in her writing. When it comes to nonfic I want to feel their pain.

I also feel that she has to be the smarts person in the world. She had no real education at all, she did not know math, and she thought herself trig in a month. She did not understand that she had to read a book for class and not just look at the photos, and still she got a PHD. So what I learned is that if you study real hard then you can do anything! Nope, I am still pretty stupid.

I do hope she got some more professional help regarding her brother because she needs closure for sure. And this sounds bad but those parts where the best parts, because here it really showed how her life had been. A mentally unstable brother and father. And how her whole world falls apart.

While the uni part frankly made me feel pretty dumb.

So can I see why everyone was talking about this one? Not really. Would I recommend it? Nah. But hey this was my non fic of the year, well of last year cos I did not read one then.

Tara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. She spent her summers bottling peaches and her winters rotating emergency supplies, hoping that when the World of Men failed, her family would continue on, unaffected.

She hadn’t been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she’d never set foot in a classroom, and no medical records because her father didn’t believe in doctors or hospitals. According to the state and federal government, she didn’t exist.

As she grew older, her father became more radical, and her brother, more violent. At sixteen Tara decided to educate herself. Her struggle for knowledge would take her far from her Idaho mountains, over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she’d travelled too far. If there was still a way home.