Educated

Sadly, I believe I’m in the minority with Tara Westover’s book, Educated.  I just did not get into this book or fall in love with it.

Some parts of this do seem farfetched, such as how an uneducated mountain wildgirl clicked her heels together, magicked up thousands of dollars (yeah, yeah, scholarships don't cover everything, you know), and went on to some of the world's most prestigious higher education centres. Intelligence is not the main thing required to attend Harvard or Cambridge; being able to pass exams and perform the system's dance is. Someone without formal education should have no idea how to do that.

Also-- are some people magically cured by herbs and finger-clicking here or did I miss some medical intervention along the way?

But I think, overall, I was just a little underwhelmed by this book because everyone seemed to find the survivalist aspect so dramatic and awful. I've read a few books about isolated communities that go off the grid and enforce their own laws and, I have to say, Westover's experience felt pretty tame. Her family were survivalists who spent months canning peaches and hunting for scrap, but is this really that odd? My grandfather used to take us to collect blackberries and then we'd spend time making blackberry jam and canning. How avant-garde.

They are also just really bad at going off the grid. I heard all these promises of "wilderness" and "mountain survivalists" but they have a phone and TV. Come on, guys! If you're going to do it, do it properly. I would say this family is more "eccentric" than "survivalist".

Where the book does succeed is as a portrait of physical and emotional abuse. I think this was the most important part of the book and it's been glossed over in favor of people's delight at learning about weirdos running around wild in the mountains. (I'm not judging; I came for that too.) I also found it really interesting and sad when the author suggested that her father's paranoid delusions might have been undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

It's a quick read with crowd-pleasing writing, I'll give it that. But it's hard to not feel like something is amiss, and certain events were probably exaggerated. Or, alternatively, Westover's "survivalist" family were sitting on a few on-the-grid dollars that conveniently popped up when equipment needed repairs and people needed to go to college. It's also possible that the writing lacked clarity because some things definitely didn't add up.

3/5 stars