Book review #11 educated

-Tara Westover

This is the first book I finished in the UK, meaning it’s been a few months since I finished reading it… I hadn’t gotten around to writing a review on it, but I still vividly remember how I felt about it so here it is!

I'd say this is a book you ought to read because it's very different from any other out there! This book is a true and raw memoir of Westover's life as a kid brought up in a Mormon family. Being the seventh child in the family, she never had a birth certificate, never visited a doctor growing up, and didn't set foot inside a classroom until she was 17. The first half of the book follows her life in the deep mountains of Idaho, helping her mother's herbal business and her father's business in his scrap yard. Some of the episodes she unravels are painful to read such as the physical violence she faced from her brother and the life-risking tasks thrown upon by her own father. She goes through countless traumatic events in her childhood that I couldn't help but to feel sympathy towards her.

The second half of the book goes into her life away from her family when she starts going to school. She navigates us through all the struggles she faces being thrown into society she was so foreign to growing up. She experiences living with roommates in college, dating guys, working part time jobs, and later on moving across the oceans to accomplish her PhD in the University of Cambridge. To think that she made all of this a reality from the little to no education she had as a little girl is extremely inspirational, and I was in awe of how powerful her drive was to make a life of her own at such a young age. It is by far one of the toughest books I've read but also one of the most influential, and I hope you feel the same if you feel convinced to read this book yourself!

If you'd like something to read to give you a new perspective on life I'd recommend this book. It's full of eye opening, jaw dropping episodes that will truly make you rethink of your surrounding loved ones and the life that you have :)