Educated
Book Review - Educated by Tara Westover
If you haven’t read Educated by Tara Westover, you’re missing out. It has received all the awards including becoming a #1 New York Times Bestseller, making Barak Obama’s favorite books of the year, and so much more.
I schedule a post a day, which is a lot of content to write and post considering this is my side hustle. I schedule a book a week (you should see the crazy spreadsheet my husband made for me to keep everything organized!) I try to remember to leave a week open for my bookclub reads - those books I read for fun with my friends here in STL, but sometimes I forget to leave a spot open for those reviews and I end up writing the post and then having to schedule it months later. This is one of those moments. If I remember correctly we read this book in January of February - and I’m just now finding an open day to post about it. It is worth the wait, trust me.
Educated is a memoir written by Tara Westover about her childhood and her quest for education. She was born into what she describes as a “survivalist family” but I would amend to say they were extremists, isolated from society. She tells vivid stories about horrifying physical injuries that were left untreated by scientific medicine - stories that I had to stop reading at times because they made me nauseous. She had stories of mental and physical abuse, child neglect, and animal cruelty. In short, this book was difficult to read. But also necessary.
In discussing this book with my book club, I was surprised that a few of the members felt they could relate to some of what Tara experienced. Some members were annoyed with Tara for not “helping herself” sooner and cutting off her family. Others were very sympathetic to Tara and could feel her struggle between the way she was raised and a future she saw as better than what she was given by her family. We were really all over the map on this one, which made it one of our more interesting discussions.