Reviews with content warning for Bullying - Leerschool

The way Tara is able to capture how trama and love and cause such conflicting emotions in oneself is so beautiful and sad. What an amazing story that her writing brings to life on the page.

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anenome's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.25

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genderqueer_hiker's review against another edition

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dark sad tense medium-paced

0.5

Repetitive, uninsightful trauma porn. The author's conclusions show a substantial lack of nuance or consideration for her upbringing and experiences in insular fundamentalism. Her representation of people's intentions seems more rooted in what she requires the interactions to mean rather than any of the depth and complexity of reality. She does not appear to have shaken one of the core tenants of fundamentalism - black and white thinking. Things are not cleanly divided into good people and bad people, right or wrong, pure or sullied, holy or evil. And frankly, I doubt this would have ended up on the NYT best sellers list if she was raised fundamentalist Christian rather than Mormon. Or if she had gone to state schools rather than Oxford and Cambridge.

I very much hope the author has found peace and safety outside of this story, but this unfiltered, unconsidered childhood narrative seems intent on titillating rather than offering anything of substance. We're encouraging to gawk, as if this is truly uncommon or unheard of. It sells the lie that only the mix of fundamentalism and (possible) mental health issues are to blame for these outcomes. The author is either unaware of her readers or just doesn't care about us - she has not done any work to tell this story without retraumatizing. She never owns any of her family's behavior as abuse - she makes excuses for them at every point. Bipolar disorder is offered up as a weak foil, but even she undermines that partial explanation by using her current voice to dismiss it as an immature consideration. She still seems incredibly early or stalled in her process.

Also, when did she attend college, that she could work a cheap summer job and have money to pay for college by herself? A lot of the money details don't make sense. It was also weird to not find out until she goes to college that she doesn't wash, and that's the norm in her family? Comments are made about her family house smelling like rot later on, but no consideration of why that might be.

This story really just felt like the author trying to find an audience for her to repeat the narrative and lore she's created to cushion her psyche. It lacked authenticity, and it's rather unusual to have a clearly unreliable narrator in a memoir. After reading it, I felt like the entire book was meant to pull a fast one, telling me a very creative fiction.

With more thought, it also bothers me that there is no mention of the police or social services being called. Perhaps Idaho is different than other places; perhaps their family was known and feared. But it doesn't make sense that particularly Shawn's publicly violent assaults of both family and local youth and their two car accidents with unregistered and uninsured vehicles never met with closer scrutiny from law enforcement. Also, given her family environment as described, I suspect sexual abuse was also part of her and/or her sister's experiences, but that is not mentioned at any point.

I also don't understand why people went out of their way to be nice to her after she left home. She writes her younger self as very abrasive, judgemental, and rude, yet people reached out and tried to nuture and take care of her (e.g., Robin and the Bishop at college). She's very socially awkward; people don't like that. Maybe BYU is more used to trying to tame feral young people from fundamentalist sects? Maybe she was very pretty? There's no reflection on why she was granted far more opportunities than most other children of separatist households (or even her own).

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alexutzu's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.5

This book was a rollercoaster of progressively developing events and emotions. The story is very powerful, while getting into it I did not expect it to unfold like this, some parts were really shocking. It's not only about religion, but also about all sorts of negative things that stem from a controlling family. The author, after a long struggle, manages to achieve amazing things (educational, behavioural, mental health-related) by breaking away from a toxic environment and fighting to stay away from it.

I have listened to an audio version of this book, which might have given me a different perspective than reading it. I liked the pacing of this version, as it seems faster and more compelling in terms of storytelling. The beginning was a bit slow, but the book caught a lot of speed in the second half.

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