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Sunday, August 5, 2018

Educated by Tara Westover

Let me start off by saying that I did not love this book.  It has gotten great reviews, and so know from the beginning that I might be amongst the few rather than the many.
This memoir spans the authors entire young life, growing up in rural Idaho in a large Mormon family with parents who lived off the grid for paranoid and religious reasons.  She describes her father as bipolar, but what she says about him doesn't raise that diagnosis as a possibility, and she has a very cruel and uncontrolled brother who physically abused her.  He father put his children in dangerous situations and left her mother to heal them.  That part of the story is about the happiest part, in that the mother uses herbs and her skills as a midwife to largely support the family.  The other plus is that three of the kids go to school, and those who manage to tolerate conventional education all pursue higher degrees and are independent, at least financially, from the yoke their parents saddled them with.  It is a good reminder that trauma always comes back to bite you, even when you have a good escape route.  You can't run and you can't hide so you better face up to it.

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