Educated

Hutchinson 400pp £14.99 The Week Bookshop £13.99

“This is the story of an extraordinary education,” said Helen Davies in The Sunday Times. Tara Westover (pictured) grew up in rural Idaho in a family “dominated by the survivalist beliefs of her bipolar Mormon father”. Her birth wasn’t registered, she never saw a doctor and she didn’t set foot in a classroom until she was 17. Yet “a decade later, she graduated with a PHD in intellectual history and political thought from the University of Cambridge”. In this “beautifully written” memoir, she describes her bizarre early life and her subsequent salvation through learning. Compelling and “ultimately joyous”, it’s a work fit to stand alongside such classics as Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

America’s “backwoods and boondocks have always attracted paranoid patriarchs determined to create their own little kingdoms”, said Damian Whitworth in The Times. One such man was Westover’s father, Gene, a man who stockpiled food and ammunition to prepare for Christ’s Second Coming; who believed schools were designed to brainwash children; and that the world was controlled by the Illuminati, a conspiratorial secret society. From the age of ten, Westover was made to work – without hard hat or gloves – in Gene’s scrapyard; she suffered frequent injuries, which were treated with the essential oils prepared by her mother, an unregistered midwife. Even worse, one of her brothers was a violent bully who subjected her to years of psychological and physical abuse. And yet it would be an “injustice” if this book were “consigned to the ‘misery lit’ shelves”, said Melissa Harrison in the Financial Times. In fact, Educated is a work of great subtlety and nuance, on a subject that should interest many readers: how dysfunction can be “normalised within the family structure”.