This book is the harrowing true story of one woman’s quest for truth, knowledge and self determination. It is one of the most powerful endorsements for the proposition that “The Truth shall set you free” and a chilling and heartbreaking account of a family slowly being destroyed by the effects of  untreated mental illness.

Tara Westover was born into a fundamentalist Mormon family in Idaho. She remembers most of her early childhood as idyllic, living on the side of a beautiful mountain with her brothers and sisters and her grandparents just down the road. But there were signs even when she was young that things were a little strange and chaotic in her family.

In her family her father controlled everything they did, what they thought and how they lived. When Tara was quite young her father became paranoid about any authority and became a survivalist insisting that they live off the grid. Schools, government, doctors, hospitals, vaccines, telephones, TV and even the Mormon church were all suspect and were potentially sources of corruption and evil. Her father was capricious and erratic, given to foul dark moods and yet loving and tender at other times. Her mother deferred in all things to their father, and although she was kind and loving, her deference to their father meant she was an unreliable advocate for her children; siding with him even when he was in the wrong.

Growing up, Tara helped her mother brew and bottle the various homeopathic remedies her mother made and helped her mother, who was a self taught, unlicensed midwife, at the home births she attended. She also occasionally helped her father in the salvage yard he ran haphazardly on their mountain property.  It wasn’t until she was 17 when at the urging of an older brother, who had defied their father to go to school and college, that she began to attend school and the world of knowledge opened up to her. Imagine not knowing about Martin Luther King Jr., or the landing on the moon, or learning about antibiotics and vaccines. Imagine sitting in a psychology class where the teacher is listing the symptoms exhibited by someone who has a bipolar disorder and wondering how they could so perfectly describe your own father.

For Tara this first taste of knowledge was truly life changing and for the next decade she pursued her education until eventually she was awarded a PhD in History from Cambridge University in 2014.  But her pursuit of knowledge put her at odds with her family and gave her a new perspective. She begins to revisit her childhood memories and looks more closely at the erratic behavior and that surrounded her father, and the threatening and abusive behavior of her older brother with new understanding and a greater appreciation for the toll it took on her own life and the life of her family.

Although Tara focuses our attention on the the power of education and how it opens doors and empowers her, I was struck by the fact that her parents had also “educated” her in their own ideas and beliefs. In reality it was not that she was “uneducated” when she went to school, it was that she had been taught unproven and erroneous ideas by her father. The clash between this pseudo knowledge and the education she gains in school based on facts and science is the true crux of this story and we see this most clearly and poignantly as Tara describes her attempts to correct false beliefs and to reason with her parents and her siblings who still remain on the mountain.  True education does have the power to set us free and it can empower us, but sometimes, like Tara found, there is a cost as well.

Brenda’s Rating: *****(5 Out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Everyone!

Book Study Worthy? YES

Read in ebook format.