Educated by Tara Westover

Book Title: Educated

Author Name: Tara Westover

Age Rating: Older Teen

Star Rating: ✦✦✦✦✦

Genre: Memoir, Autobiography

Summary: Tara Westover holds a PhD in history, she’s attended Cambridge, and was awarded a medal by Joe Biden. Yet Dr. Westover has never attended high school. This memoir recounts the story of why Tara Westover never received a high school education, and how despite her educational standing, she managed to become a PhD holder.

Westover’s father is a survivalist Mormon who denied her an education when she was a child. In her youth, she spent her days canning peaches and preparing for the End Days, which her father believed were imminent. Due to her family’s attitude surrounding a formal education, the author was technically homeschooled, but never learned much beyond how to read and basic addition and subtraction. Additionally, this led her to initially disregard the value of getting an education. Overall, the story shows how the author’s perspective morphed over time as her experiences shaped who she became.

Favorite Character: As this book is a memoir, it doesn’t feel right to call the people in Westover’s story characters. I would instead say that Westover’s brother Tyler was very nice, and based upon the way the author described her other siblings, I think I liked Tyler the most out of all of them.

Storyline Development: The memoir covers Westover’s journey of becoming educated. Tara Westover recounts her difficult childhood, her relationship with her parents and her siblings, and how her father’s religious beliefs instilled her and her family with very different values in comparison to normal Mormons. 

Westover also shows how she ended up starting her educational career in college, without ever have attending high school or obtaining a GED, Westover passed the ACT well enough to get into college, but she did not possess the latent study skills and foundations built by practice that most high school graduates have. Due to this she struggled in her first years at college. But she slowly adjusted.

Worldbuilding: The memoir, being a memoir, is set in our normal world. But Tara Westover’s perception of the world in her childhood, was constrained to her family home in Idaho and the community she lived in. Over the course of the book, the author’s writing shows how her world expanded as she grew older and learned more about the world around her.
My Thoughts: Westover’s story illustrates how children are raised the way they are raised, and because of it, their entire world-view is based on the worldview their family provides them. Overall I highly recommend this book for those who want to gain insight and learn about another person’s life, and how they faced and overcame the difficulties they faced on their journey to achieve their goals.