The story of Tara's survivalist fundamentalist Mormon childhood in Idaho and her leaving to pursue an education.

I first happened upon this book when someone whose book taste I love recommended it passionately on twitter… now I see why. 

It’s not just a fascinating subject matter, but also a book that's incredibly evocative and movingly told. What really kept me thinking afterwards was how well she talked about the complex web of feelings she has towards her family, and how even when she started to emerge into what I guess what we’ll call ‘the real world’, huge fragments of the teachings she was brought up with still wrapped around her consciousness. ‘Sin’ for example, and ‘duty’. I’m so glad that she made it out to a place where she was able to write this book, and I’m happy for her it’s been such a success. I only wonder what her family think of it and of her now. Definitely not an easy journey for her, but an inspiring one for us.

A very easy book to recommend to all and sundry.

Wow! This has to be one of the most inspiring books I have read in years. Brilliantly written, it conveys the transformation that education brings about in Tara.  Not only in terms of academic accomplishment, but perhaps more importantly, in empowering  her to find herself. Her early years in an ardently Mormon household, hidden away in remote Idaho, is truly chilling. The unbending discipline of her father dominates the entire household as he refuses to allow the family any access to hospitals, schools,, parties - all of which he regards as leading them straight to the Devil. So the children are all home-schooled by their mother but even this is curtailed by their father as he makes all of them work increasingly long hours in his scrapyard. Most of the children get dreadfully injured ,at some point or other, carrying out this work and are sent in to their mother to patch them up with natural herbs and simple bandages. Somehow they survive, but their father's dominance goes largely unchallenged. Tara, however, determines to break free from these restrictive shackles and somehow understands that freedom lies in getting an education. But this in turn demands a complete break from her family.  So as not to spoil your enjoyment I won't tell you more, other than that what she achieves is truly incredible. Her teachers are amazingly supportive in repeatedly encouraging her onwards, even though she feels she just has to return home to her father's world.
Whilst her sense of disloyalty, to both the Mormon faith and her father, is ever-present and threatens to defeat her, ultimately education provides her with the strength and wisdom to establish a new life. Lest any reader should doubt this link there is a chilling reality in that, when her family ultimately fractures, the 4 siblings that never broke out and got an education reject Tara completely. They cling to the words and beliefs of their father and accept all the hardship and brutality that he continues  to imposes on their lives.   However Tara, along with the two brothers who also broke away and sought education, form a new family bond - one which recognises they have an absolute right to walk a different path. Tara's tale is truly uplifting.  This is a brilliant, albeit on occasions unbelievably painful, read.

This is a five star book from beginning to end. Tara Westover, born in 1986, writes of growing up in a remote part of Idaho with parents who were fundamental Mormons and a father who was a survivalist. The family were poor initially and made most of their income running a scrapyard. Tara, the youngest of seven children was expected to help in the business from an early age. Health and safety were non existent. Also non-existent seem to be basic common sense and a parental desire to protect your children. There were several dreadful accidents both in the scrapyard and on the road but somehow Tara knew she had to get an education and out of this harsh environment. Her story of making it to Cambridge University and Harvard is quite incredible to the point you would think it was nonsense if written as fiction. But this is not fiction - her incredible journey from never going to school or being home-schooled to getting degrees from the world's top academic institutions really happened.

While I was gripped by the tale it did leave me with many questions. Tara says that it is not a book about religion so their family being fundamental Mormons is not dwelled on but I would have liked to hear more as I thought that fundamental Mormons practiced polygamy but no members of this family practice polygamy. I also question how someone with no education at all can get into BYU. And not just Tara but 2 of her siblings who were also not educated either in school or homeschooled.

On one hand I was keen to get to the end to know what happened but on the other hand I didn't want it to finish as it was such a gripping tale. I truly hope Tara writes a further volume in a few years or one of her siblings or parents write a book themselves. 

With thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK, Cornerstone for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Raised in a radical Mormon family in rural Idaho, Tara Westover’s father believed the end times would soon come. Her childhood consisted of gathering provisions for their survival, working in her father’s scrapyard, and shunning education for her mother’s version of home-schooling. Throughout her childhood she never visited a doctor, received a vaccine, or took a pill for pain, as her father believed the medical establishment was in cahoots with the Illuminati, and any medicine or pills taken would stay in your body and cause you long term harm.

Despite the constant emotional and physical abuse that she suffers at the hands of her family, Westover manages (without having ever gone to school) to get into Brigham Young University, paving the way for an educational journey that will take her to the hallowed halls of Harvard and Cambridge, earning her a PhD in intellectual history and political thought.

This book is so so good. The journey that Westover takes is so full of craziness and self-doubt that we are with her every step of the way, urging her on and willing her success. Her story is told incredibly well, excellently written. It is never self-indulgent, which a memoir like this could so easily have been.
I read this book in 2 days, which is very quick for me. At the end of each chapter I would tell myself ‘just one more’, staying up way past my bedtime to read more. I couldn’t put it down! For anyone who is thinking of picking this up, DO IT.

There are so many aspects of this book which are fascinating _ the isolated upbringing, prepping, Mormons, mental health, determination to succeed, and most importantly, the power of education.
It is an amazing story. Tara suffers in so many ways as a child, and yet, to her, all this is normal. Her journey from run down, dangerous scrap yard in Idaho to Cambridge University would be unbelievable in a work of fiction, and yet it is true. 
It is impossible not to be touched by her resistance and determination.
Highly recommended.

Yes, as many reviewers have said, this was a hard book to read. I had to stop a couple of times and come back when I had taken a deep breath. 
. Saddened deeply at the levels of brutality and non understanding in Tara's family. Saddened by the fanaticism in her father, swiftly followed by a brother. Saddened by the meekness of her mother in giving way to these dictators in her home.
Despite having no support system, Tara somehow reached her target of becoming educated, the only way out for her. Still her loyalty to this dysfunctional family never wavered although the response was cold.
I admire her for writing this book.
Thanks to NetGalley for a review copy.

The overall premise of this book, that someone can come from a dysfunctional, sometimes brutal family who oppose formal education, and still gain a PhD is quite uplifting. But for me it was too brutal and full of abuse which was never really  dealt with, just seemed to be accepted as a part of life. The main characters were well drawn, and there was a good insight into the more rigid Mormon beliefs. However the girl at the centre of the story, whilst supposedly clever enough to win scholarships and produce brilliant work, didn't seem to realise that she was being badly abused by her family, and other members of the family were also being abused, whilst the abusers hid behind their beliefs.  I found the story depressing and with gaps along the way. Not a good insight into Mormons and their beliefs.

Educated is a tale of struggle, resilience, and bravery from Tara and some of her siblings. There's also so much betrayal and abuse in there too from Tara's father - often to the point that it is sometimes hard to read. I just hate to think that someone can treat their own family this way, wondering at times if this can really be possible - but the fact that it is Tara Westover's real life in the pages of this book just shows that, sadly, there is real evil in this world - but also some real light, too!

The support Tara got as she grew up is more uplifting and I liked learning about her life at the universities she attended. She's incredibly naive at times and often quite hard to 'work out', but this all added to my interest in the book. I also really enjoyed reading about the Mormon faith - I still don't feel like I know that much about the faith because, even with my limited knowledge, I can tell that no one could think that the Westover family is a 'typical' Mormon family!

It's an inspiring read, and for someone like me who generally enjoyed school and spends a lot of time reading, it's crazy to think some children aren't given the same opportunities from a young age and are even blocked from accessing education by those who are supposed to care and love them.

Educated is definitely a thought-provoking and unusual read, and one I would recommend.

Having recently read Rebecca Stott’s ‘Days of Rain’, another memoir about growing up within a restrictive religious group might have been a little too much.  Not so.  This is a brilliant exposition of metaphorical and literal journeying from a family’s world so saturated in abuse and ignorance that it is normalised to a life in which the individual fights to win scholarships and university places where she is encouraged to blossom and grow intellectually and emotionally, something made all the more extraordinary by the fact that Tara Westover never went to school and spent most days helping out her father in his highly dangerous scrapyard, avoiding the most serious of physical injuries by luck rather than any health and safety practice!
If you pick up ‘Educated’ expecting to be tutored in and shocked by the unfamiliar (to most of us) doctrine of Mormonism, you will be disappointed.  This is not a memoir which excoriates any one faith system and we see pretty quickly that Tara’s father’s beliefs are not in any way the norm within the Mormon community.  Suffering from bipolar disorder, he is delusional, passionate, at times downright dangerous and often depressed.  He controls his family with an iron will and as Tara struggles to free herself of guilt when disobeying her father and, in particular, tries to break away from her brother Shawn’s coercive and often brutal behaviour, it takes her years to make peace with the notion that she will have to walk away from some family members if she is to ever be true to her real self.  This memoir is a superb study in how even very able, talented, curious and sensitive people can be brainwashed into behaving in self-destructive ways when a society’s patriarchal rules encourage all-encompassing power to be wielded with little regard for the law.
Tara Westover describes traumatic events without resorting to gratuitous description.  She is careful not to take the easy route of applying ‘monster’ and ‘redeemer’ labels because she knows that life is much more complicated. Throughout the depictions of all of her suffering – both physical and mental – there is no self-pity and this makes the tale all the stronger.  A wonderful exposition on love, loyalty, terror and guilt, and, eventually, self-belief and inner strength.
My thanks to NetGalley and Random House New York for an e-copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.

A fascinating story about a girl who grows up with a religious fanatical family.  Growing up with a complete lack of understanding about even the simplest of life skills and knowledge she has no birth certificate and does not exist in any records of normal life.  It is a difficult read due to descriptions of violence, cruelty and ignorance.  However, the strength of Tara is amazing and following her incredible journey to self educate herself is truly rewarding.

Tara Westover had a harrowing upbringing, as the seventh child in a fundamentalist Mormon family in the backwoods of Idaho. Her childhood and teenage years were peppered with car accidents, work accidents, and other mental and physical trauma and abuse.

Despite all that and despite lacking any education and she was never sent to school or homeschooled, she ends up getting a college education and eventually, a pHD at Cambridge University in the UK.

The writing style, some niggling gaps in the story and some things that didn't quite add up kept me at a distance, so I never really got a sense of who Tara Westover really was.

Educated was a horrifying and compelling read.  Westover's memoir is centred around the idea of the 'education' which took her from a junkyard in Idaho to Oxford and Harvard, and her achievements are particularly astonishing given that her first experience of formal education was at undergraduate level, and that her family life was heartbreakingly violent.  

Her family's dysfunction is presented in chilling detail through a narrative voice which combines her childhood acceptance of the trauma she endured and her adult rejection of it.  These different perspectives mean the story seems disjointed or incomplete in places, perhaps because the events are still relatively recent and Westover has not fully come to terms with them.

The main issue I had with this book was the balance, or lack of balance, between the terrifying events of Tara Westover's childhood and her dazzling academic achievements.  The sheer weight of abuse, violence and trauma was overwhelming at times, and I was disappointed that in comparison, her experiences and achievements in education, from the early days reading books at home to her work as a PhD student were undeveloped - I would have loved to read more about this.

This unforgettable memoir tells of a young woman's off-grid upbringing in Idaho and the hard work that took her from almost complete ignorance to a Cambridge PhD.

Tara Westover had the kind of upbringing most of us can only imagine. She was the youngest of seven children raised in Buck Peak, Idaho by Mormon parents who distrusted the federal government and anticipated the end of days. Her father refused to register his children's births, so Westover had no birth certificate or knowledge of her exact birthday. Westover's dad also rejected formal education, so none of his children attended school. They could study at home from a meager selection of textbooks if they chose, but their father valued practical skills more. He put Westover to work in his junkyard, sorting scrap metal when she was merely 10. She also babysat, packed nuts, and worked in a grocery store. But she never went to school.

Few of the simple pleasures of childhood were available. Musical theater provided rare moments of joy in a life of hard labor that included assisting her mother, who was an unofficial midwife and herbalist. The family went through two serious car accidents and her brother Shawn suffered multiple head injuries at his father's construction site. Shawn's behavior grew cruel, especially after his brain damage. He would put Westover's head down the toilet, bend her wrist back until it nearly snapped, and call her a "whore" for wearing lip gloss. This sadistic pattern was repeated with another sister and later, with his wife, yet Westover struggled to convince her parents to believe her and do something, anything, about Shawn's manipulative violence.

Education was Westover's means of escape. Like her brother Tyler before her, she studied independently until she passed the ACT and earned acceptance to Brigham Young University. Here she was forced to wake up to her extreme ignorance. She raised a hand in history class to ask what "the Holocaust" meant, and learned who Martin Luther King, Jr. was. A study abroad year at King's College, Cambridge, opened her mind even more and paved the way for her return to England for Master's and PhD degrees in history. One professor told her she'd written one of the best essays he'd read in 30 years, and referred to her as his "Pygmalion" – a fresh mind that he could mold for success.

From an Idaho junkyard to the venerable halls of Cambridge—it was disorienting for Westover to think of how far she had come and truly believe she deserved to be there. Trips home plunged her back into family turmoil. Her parents disapproved of her pursuing education instead of marriage and motherhood, and her father was severely burned in a fuel tank explosion. He didn't believe in modern medicine, so never went to a hospital; his wife treated him at home with her herbal salves, a booming business that made them wealthy.

Westover's incredible story is about testing the limits of perseverance and sanity. Her father may have been a survivalist, but her psychic survival is the most impressive outcome here. Although this memoir represents Westover's own perspective, she strives to be rational and charitable by questioning her own memory and interpretation of events, often looking for outside confirmation from other family members who witnessed the same events. And though the temptation must have been strong, she doesn't portray her father as a villain; he's more like an Old Testament patriarch, fierce and unmovable. She is careful not to make hers a simple narrative about rejecting Mormonism – in fact, she opens with a disclaimer to that effect – because her parents' extremism was far beyond what is the norm for Mormons.

The writing takes this astonishing life story to the next level, making it a classic to sit alongside memoirs by Alexandra Fuller, Mary Karr and Jeannette Walls. Westover narrates with calm authority, channeling the style of the scriptures and history books that were formative in her upbringing and education. One of my favorite passages reflects on the fundamental differences between her father's viewpoint and her own: "My father and I looked at the temple. He saw God; I saw granite. We looked at each other. He saw a woman damned; I saw an unhinged old man, literally disfigured by his beliefs."

This is one of the most powerful and well-written memoirs I've ever read. In its first half a young girl spends lonely years in the wide-open sanctuary of the American West: "Her classroom was a heap of junk. Her textbooks, slates of scrap," Westover writes. In the second half the whole world and its history open up to her, but at a high price: "having sacrificed my family to my education." The author remains estranged from her parents, and the siblings have formed two factions: four work for her parents' herbal empire in Idaho; three left to pursue education, all obtaining doctoral degrees. Which route would you choose?

Such a brave, honest, intelligent account of a childhood that was anything but conventional. Despite physical and mental abuse, being made to work in conditions that no-one, least of all a young child, should and a lack of any formal education, Tara not only survived but educated herself and ultimately became a PhD. But she mourned the loss of her family along the way and even though her eyes were opened to the fallacies that she had been fed all her life, she still missed them and loved them despite everything.  One of her brothers was clearly mentally ill, as was her father, and she suffered incredible abuse from him that her parents refused to acknowledge.  Was sexual abuse also involved and Tara cannot yet voice this? It was his treatment of her and her sister that finally caused the split with her family and a breakdown in Tara.  But she began to heal and flourish,  finding support within the extended family unit. Brutal, chilling but ultimately a tale of the human spirit overcoming terrible obstacles to shine, it grows in strength as she does and in the end we are dazzled.

Undoubtedly a fascinating story.
I felt at times it missed the details beyond family - things like the first day at formal education, the process of integrating. A lot of the education part was very high level overviews - I would have loved to find out more of her day to day transition.

A intriguing autobiography spanning Tara’s hectic childhood in rural Idaho.

As a companion piece to Rebecca Stott's Days of Rain this is an incredible read of one woman's triumph over adversity, which however came at huge personal cost as a child and adult. It is a tale of religious extremism versus education and the triumph of the will. My heart was in my mouth throughout.

Tara Westover's book Educated is a memoir of her childhood growing up in rural Idaho - home-schooled, bottling food for the End Days, listening to her father's fundamentalist Mormon prepper rants - and what happens when she challenges the assumptions their family is built on. Superbly written and thought provoking; I just finished this last night and I'm utterly blown away by it.

What a ride! One of the most intense books I’ve ever read. Told from the perspective of Tara, born into a Mormon family in rural Idaho to an overbearing zealous survivalist father and a kowtowing mother, with four brothers and a sister. Coerced from a very early age to work in her father’s scrapyard with virtually no schooling, the sheer physicality and danger to life and limb  for her and her brothers is breathtaking. You will loathe the father, want to shake up the mother and take out Tara from this vicious, toxic environment. But the constant dogmatic brainwashing works: One has to be righteous and when devastating things happen, they do because it is God’s will. When I told my husband about the book, he thought it was just a novel, but I knew from its sheer intensity that it could only have been written by someone who had been through this ordeal.  Tara eventually escapes the life at the scrapyard heading for academia, but she pays a hefty price and is plagued by detachment, guilt and self-doubt. Her parents side with Tara’s viciously brutal brother Shawn and cast her out of the family. Just this week, an interview with Tara Westover appeared in the Times Magazine - that’s where I’m heading now. An unputdownable tour-de-force!