A review by wooolesia
Educated by Tara Westover

challenging reflective medium-paced

4.5

I underestimated how much violence there would be in this book. More striking even than the acts of intentional harm, which are numerous,  was the kind of casual, everyday violence of the scrapyard and farm, from lost fingers to blinded eyes to grotesque jobsite accidents to not one, but two near-identical road accidents— fruits of the negligence made possible when safety takes on a moral valence and survival is bestowed only by the angels who protect the righteous. Westover weaves together the brutality of her youth with its genuine tendernesses as warp and weft in the same, seamless “normal,” effectively allowing the reader to understand some part of why its horrors went  uninterrogated. Why would you push back against
your  older brother’s sadistic, misogynistic abuse
when 
your father was willing to impale you on some scrap metal for the sake of worksite efficiency
?

Westover also has remarkable magnanimity, extending grace to everyone from
that terrifying older brother, to her deranged father, enabling mother, even the also-abused sister who recants her testimony and denies her sister when the family starts to tighten the screws
. To some extent, this radical acceptance of her family members & abusers as whole persons who cannot be either wholly condemned or wholly forgiven, also leads to the memoir’s rare narrative failures. I found myself craving more curiosity in Westover’s authorial voice, more interrogation of why or how the people who hurt her did so. Part of me yearned fot a companion piece in the style of “Under the Banner of Heaven,” exploring the currents in the family’s community and culture that may have carried them to such grostesque shores—the same
community that defends them to this day, if Desert News’ recent puff piece is anything to go by (while, the family denied all allegations of abuse, they did so with such perfectly evocative phrasing that the article only strengthens Westover’s characterizations of their self-delusion). But while I as a reader may have felt there was something missing, Westover seems to suggest that only by presenting her experiences organically, without chopping them into pieces for searing analysis, could she tell the whole story.
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