Booklist Reviews

To the Westovers, public education was the quickest way to put yourself on the wrong path. By the time the author, the youngest Westover, had come along, her devout Mormon parents had pulled all of their seven children out of school, preferring to teach just the essentials: a little bit of reading, a lot of scripture, and the importance of family and a hard day's work. Westover's debut memoir details how her isolated upbringing in the mountains of Idaho led to an unexpected outcome: Cambridge, Harvard, and a PhD. Though Westover's entrance into academia is remarkable, at its heart, her memoir is a family history: not just a tale of overcoming but an uncertain elegy to the life that she ultimately rejected. Westover manages both tenderness and a savage honesty that spares no one, not even herself: nowhere is this more powerful than in her relationship with her brother Shawn, her abuser and closest friend. In its keen exploration of family, history, and the narratives we create for ourselves, Educated becomes more than just a success story. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews.

BookPage Reviews

Reclaiming a survivalist childhood

Describing her childhood as the youngest of seven children growing up without schooling in the shadow of Buck Peak, Idaho, Tara Westover says, "It all seemed very normal to me."

Speaking by phone from her home in Cambridge, England, Westover, 31, describes her life's improbable trajectory that led to her startling memoir, Educated. It was so unusual, in fact, that a bidding war erupted over the sale of her book, which is now being published in more than 20 countries and has inspired comparisons to Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club.

When her survivalist father recounted the story of the 11-day siege of Randy Weaver in the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff, its vivid details became young Westover's strongest memory. It was as though the Feds had invaded her own house with deadly gunfire. Striving to become fully independent and off the grid, the Westovers stockpiled food, gasoline, guns and a bullet-making machine in preparation for the End of Days.

"I was kind of looking forward to it in a lot of ways," she recalls. "We were totally prepared. It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty because we were going to have food and gasoline―all the things that people needed."

The younger children in Westover's family didn't have birth certificates or exact birthdates. She wasn't allowed to go to school, and there was little homeschooling. "By the time I was 10, the only subject I had studied systematically was Morse code, because Dad insisted that I learn it," she writes. Doctors and hospitals were forbidden as well; the family relied on her mother's herbs and essential oils, even after car accidents, concussions and severe burns. An older brother taught Westover to read, using Little Bear Goes to the Moon as her primer. A few books lay around the house, but lessons and tests were nonexistent.

She grew up studying the Book of Mormon, the Bible and essays by 19th-century Mormon prophets. Westover emphasizes that her story is not about Mormonism. She believes that mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder, led to her father's extremism.

"There is a caricature of Mormonism that people have," she explains. "I don't want to contribute to that. These aren't Mormon attributes. Mormons send their kids to school."

Nor does Westover want her father to come across as a caricature. "Sure, his views are interesting," she notes. "What's also interesting is the fact that he sincerely believes them and that he is trying to look after his kids."

Educated is the remarkable story of Westover's education. She taught herself math so she could take the ACT, and at age 17 she first set foot in a classroom after enrolling in Brigham Young University. Fellow students laughed at her for having never heard of the Holocaust. Despite failing her first exam and fearing she would flunk out, she graduated in 2008 and later earned a Ph.D. in history at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Despite the gaping holes in their early education, three of the seven Westover children ended up earning Ph.D.s. "We seriously overcompensated."

In many ways, Westover says, she had a positive childhood. "I grew up on a beautiful mountain that was like an amazing cathedral. The scrap yard at times was kind of like an exotic playground. And those are real parts of my childhood."

"It was going to be a reversal of fortunes. My family had always been poor and looked down upon. Suddenly we were going to be royalty."

However, a giant cloud overshadowed everything. Her father's actions often endangered his children, and her childhood was complicated by years of physical and emotional abuse by an older brother. Her brother and parents deny this assertion, which has resulted in her estrangement from them and certain siblings.

Westover says leaving home and becoming educated "made me see my brother's violence for what it was. . . . Suddenly, I could not accept it. And so once I started writing, I realized it's really not possible for me to tell the story of my education in any kind of meaningful way without telling the family story."

At first, the ongoing estrangement posed a problem in searching for an ending to her story. Westover admits, "In the end, I decided that maybe not having a neat ending would be what this book was about." Perhaps, she adds, "people would see bits of their messy lives in my messy life."

Her unique history presents hurdles when it comes to how she relates to her family in the present. "Most of the time I am no longer angry with them," she says, "and the reason is that I am no longer afraid of them. I am no longer under their power."

Anger did, however, color her outlook for years. "I became someone who had no beautiful memories," she recalls. Writing helped her reconcile the contradictory truths of her past. "I could keep all of them because they're mine, and no one can take from me the good, but also no one can obscure for me the bad."

To prepare to write a book-length narrative, Westover read widely. And then, someone mentioned something called the short story. "I'd never heard of that before." After listening to favorite episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast 40 to 50 times, she modeled each chapter like a short story. The strategy makes her memoir particularly readable and compelling. "For me it was the greatest curriculum," she says.

Westover concludes, "You only get the life that you get. I'm glad that I was pushed in that way because now I know what I'm able to do. . . . But I wouldn't go back and go through that again. Not for anything."

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Paul Stuart.

Copyright 2018 BookPage Reviews.

Kirkus Reviews

A recent Cambridge University doctorate debuts with a wrenching account of her childhood and youth in a strict Mormon family in a remote region of Idaho.It's difficult to imagine a young woman who, in her teens, hadn't heard of the World Trade Center, the Holocaust, and virtually everything having to do with arts and popular culture. But so it was, as Westover chronicles here in fairly chronological fashion. In some ways, the author's father was a classic anti-government paranoiac—when Y2K failed to bring the end of the world, as he'd predicted, he was briefly humbled. Her mother, though supportive at times, remained true to her beliefs about the subordinate roles of women. One brother was horrendously abusive to the author and a sister, but the parents didn't do much about it. Westover didn't go to public school and never received professional medical care or vaccinations. She worked in a junkyard with her father, whose fortunes rose and fell and rose again when his wi fe struck it rich selling homeopathic remedies. She remained profoundly ignorant about most things, but she liked to read. A brother went to Brigham Young University, and the author eventually did, too. Then, with the encouragement of professors, she ended up at Cambridge and Harvard, where she excelled—though she includes a stark account of her near breakdown while working on her doctoral dissertation. We learn about a third of the way through the book that she kept journals, but she is a bit vague about a few things. How, for example, did her family pay for the professional medical treatment of severe injuries that several of them experienced? And—with some justification—she is quick to praise herself and to quote the praise of others. An astonishing account of deprivation, confusion, survival, and success. Copyright Kirkus 2017 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Reviews

Raised in the Idaho mountains by survivalist parents who eschewed schooling and doctors, Westover hungered so powerfully for education that she taught herself, getting to Brigham Young University and eventually Cambridge University for a PhD. One of the publisher's big books of the season.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal.

Library Journal Reviews

Raised on a secluded family compound in Idaho, Westover was seven before realizing the biggest difference between her family and others was not their remote home, or their Mormon religion—but that "we don't go to school." Westover helped the family maintain a minimalist existence through construction, scrapping, and midwifery, no matter how many injuries she sustained. But when the author's wounds go untreated, leaving her mother mentally compromised and herself an object of abuse, cracks in her upbringing began to appear. Westover's brother Tyler is the first to leave home for college, later encouraging her to do the same. "There's a world out there, Tara…it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear." Starting her academic career at Brigham Young University, Westover continued to earn academic achievements, including a PhD in history from Cambridge University. VERDICT Explicit descriptions of abuse can make for difficult reading, but for a student who started from a point of near illiteracy, Westover's writing is lyrical and literary in style. With no real comparison memoir, this joins the small number of Mormon exposés of recent years. [See "Editors' Spring Picks," p. 29.—Ed.]—Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH

Copyright 2018 Library Journal.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

A girl claws her way out of a claustrophobic, violent fundamentalist family into an elite academic career in this searing debut memoir. Westover recounts her upbringing with six siblings on an Idaho farm dominated by her father Gene (a pseudonym), a devout Mormon with a paranoid streak who tried to live off the grid, kept four children (including the author) out of school, refused to countenance doctors (Westover's mother, Faye, was an unlicensed midwife who sold homeopathic medicines), and stockpiled supplies and guns for the end-time. Westover was forced to work from the age of 11 in Gene's scrap and construction businesses under incredibly dangerous conditions; the grisly narrative includes lost fingers, several cases of severe brain trauma, and two horrible burns that Faye treated with herbal remedies. Thickening the dysfunction was the author's bullying brother, who physically brutalized her for wearing makeup and other immodest behaviors. When she finally escaped the toxic atmosphere of dogma, suspicion, and patriarchy to attend college and then grad school at Cambridge, her identity crisis precipitated a heartbreaking rupture. Westover's vivid prose makes this saga of the pressures of conformity and self-assertion that warp a family seem both terrifying and ordinary. (Feb.)

Copyright 2017 Publishers Weekly.

School Library Journal Reviews

Raised in an alternative Mormon home in rural Idaho, Westover worked as an assistant midwife to her mother and labored in her father's junkyard. Formal schooling wasn't a priority, because her parents believed that public education was government indoctrination and that Westover's future role would be to support her husband. But her older brother's violence and their family's refusal to acknowledge problems at home resulted in the teen contemplating escape through education. Admittance to Brigham Young University was difficult. Westover taught herself enough to receive a decent score on the ACT, but because of her upbringing, she didn't understand rudimentary concepts of sanitation and etiquette, and her learning curve was steep. However, she eventually thrived, earning scholarships to Harvard and Cambridge—though she grappled with whether to include her toxic family in her new life. Born in 1986, Westover interviewed family members to help her write the first half. Her well-crafted account of her early years will intrigue teens, but the memoir's second part, covering her undergraduate and graduate experiences in the "real world," will stun them. VERDICT A gripping, intimate, sometimes shocking, yet ultimately inspiring work. Perfect for fans of memoirs about overcoming traumatic childhoods or escaping from fundamentalist religious communities, such as Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle and Ruth Wariner's The Sound of Gravel.—Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL

Copyright 2018 School Library Journal.