Book Review: Educated by Tara Westover

February 8, 2021

This may be one of my new favorite books. 

I had heard so much about this book for the past couple of years and, being the 4 that I am, I wanted nothing to do with it, but it kept gnawing at me. Something in me was drawn to ask for it for Christmas this year, and my sweet mother-in-law gave it to me. It was the first thing I ready this year and boy was it a great way to start 2021. 

Tara Westover is a brilliant woman who came from the mountains in Idaho surrounded by a family that didn’t believe in modern medicine or public education. She was part of a large family that was expected to follow in their fathers footsteps and prepare for the end times. Growing up in a strict, and extreme, Mormon household, she was taught to cook and mix oils rather than mathematics and world history. 

Here is a short bio that she wrote about herself: “Tara Westover is an American author. Raised in Idaho by a father who opposed public education, she never attended school. She spent her days working in her family’s junkyard or stewing herbs for her mother, a self-taught herbalist and midwife. She was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. After that, she pursued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. In 2014 she earned a PhD in history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and currently she is a senior research fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard. Educated is her first book.”

This book was brilliant and honest and poetic without, even for a moment, being frilly and fluffy. It is sad in some aspects and hopeful in others. Tara is an inspiration, but never once makes the reader feel like they should be doing more, being more and working harder because “if I can do it anyone can” but rather is just telling her story based on her memory (which is another very beautiful thing about her story – she makes note when she has come across inconsistencies in the story that she tells and that her family tells.) 

This was a beautiful book that I would suggest to anyone and everyone.