Educated

The recap

Tara Westover grew up in the mountains of rural Idaho, the youngest of seven children in a family ruled by her father's fierce convictions. He distrusted the government, public schools and doctors, so the children were kept out of classrooms and hospitals alike, spending their days stockpiling supplies for the end of the world, helping their mother brew herbal remedies and salvaging scrap in the family junkyard, where even serious injuries were treated at home. With no birth certificate and almost no formal schooling, Tara began teaching herself enough to sit a college entrance exam, a choice that set her on a path toward places her family could barely imagine. Her memoir traces that journey with startling candor, but its deeper subject is the cost of change: what it means to love people whose version of the past differs from your own, and how much of yourself you can remake without losing home altogether. Precise, unsentimental and often harrowing, it reads with the pull of a novel.