Educated: A Memoir

This is a little hard for me to rate because I certainly am very moved by Tara Westover's journey and have a huge amount of respect for everything she overcame.

This is a great book for reading and muttering “wow that's fucked up” to yourself.

That said, it's hard for me not to compare this negatively to The Glass Castle–they're both somewhat similar stories of very difficult childhoods with charismatic but unstable fathers–but The Glass Castle is so beautifully written, and this is more a straightforward listing of events. Again–the events are extremely compelling and I have nothing but respect for Tara and her journey. Her story does make you think about education and what pieces of knowledge we tend to take for granted. (When Tara went to college, she raised her hand in a class and asked what the Holocaust was, because she genuinely did not know. I also appreciated the way she unpacked the systematic way the things left out of her extremely spotty homeschool education were designed to uphold racist/sexist/otherwise oppressive viewpoints.)

I'd definitely recommend it to people who are drawn to stories of fundamentalism/doomsday prepping etc, and also perhaps to educators.