Educated (a memoir) by Tara Westover

Wow. Just... wow.

Before starting I want to give you a sense of just how good this book is. I started it three days ago, and only got about thirty pages in. The next two days were spent desperately hoarding snippets of time between work and responsibilities to read the remaining three hundred pages. This book is an incredible story, incredibly well written.

On to actually talking about it instead of yakking about how great a read it is. Educated is fantastic. Not just because it's great, but because if the words 'a memoir' weren't so prominent on the cover I would have assumed it was someone's accounts of a many years long fever dream.

From the way the story unfolds, to how every thread ends in a crossroads that will make your stomach twist in a knot and have you fretting over whether Tara will do the right thing, or fold back into her family's backwards ways, this book is well done. The story covers Tara's life over the course of about twenty years. The very strong themes of education, family, dogmatism, and mental health writhe together into the tangled mess that is her family dynamic, and her life's trajectory slowly clawing her way out of the hell she lived in.

If you're not one for gory details or harsh realism, I would not recommend this book. To everyone else: this is a coming of age story that absolutely earns a spot on your library's shelves. Westover's writing, especially in relation to her early lack of education, paints a hauntingly beautiful portrait that you will not want to miss.