Maureen's Reviews > Educated

Does anyone else smell that? Me smells a (James Frey, A Million Little Pieces) rat here. This is what I hate about memoirs. An author can fill page upon page with a load of made up BS and we are meant to fall for it hook, line and sinker. I have made this argument before, even though a memoir is based upon the recollection of the author, it should still be FACTUAL!

Let's begin at the beginning. I almost stopped reading this book at page 3. I read the alliterative phrase 'chirping crickets' three times on ONE page. I lived not far from where Tara Westover grew up and we had these:



MORMON CRICKETS

NOT these:



REGULAR OLD CRICKET

There is no lovely cricket chirping sound with the first because they are not a cricket. They are actually a katydid. Ok, enough science.

Westover is apparently








all rolled into one. Jackie Chan because no one alive other than him has suffered the number of life-threatening injuries and survived to tell about - oh wait, except for Tara Westover. Confucius because of her astounding insight and prophetic sayings, and John Stuart Mill because Westover has got the philosophy of feminism down like no other philosopher since Mill. (At least that unsightly knot on Mill's forehead would jive with what Westover should look like if she had been through as many physical catastrophes as she claims).

Westover is ready to give these singers a run for their money since she sings like a goddess after never opening her mouth before. WATCH OUT:





Tara Westover will be receiving her Grammy, Tony, Emmy and Oscar before she is 40, I am sure.

That is if she is not too busy adding colloquialisms to the vocabulary for the rest of us. Hey, Tara, EVERYONE calls a blinding, windy winter storm a WHITE OUT. They didn't make that up in Idaho.


Westover is the greatest thesis writer, the greatest dissertation writer, the greatest student Cambridge has ever seen. All while being a complete idiot.

She goes from having no

(Sorry I couldn't resist taking a jab at the end of days BS in this book)

to having enough to fly to ROME and back and forth to the US countless times! That must have been one HELL of a PELL grant.

Westover says "...I'd been surprised to discover echoes of Mormon theology in the great philosophers of the nineteenth century." Shouldn't that be the other way around - that Joseph Smith ripped off philosophers not that they thought he was so profound as to steal from him?


Her father would have been dead, dead, dead if he had suffered burns to the degree that she claims. He would have contracted an infection or pneumonia and would not have survived. And since the bottom of his face was gone as she purports, how was he able to hold a phone up to his shoulder? If his hands were so disfigured, how was he able to write, drive or BUILD AN EXTENSION on their house?!


I could fill this review with inconsistency after inconsistency, but I am sick of this book. I am sick of hearing about it. I am sick of having read it.



Some will ask why I read this whole book if I hated it so much. And the answer is that if I was going to be savage about this book, and I was, I wanted to read the whole thing.

SOOOOOO, this savage spent the entirety of this book doing this:


P.S. Hey Random House Publishing, I will be sending you my deats for a refund for this POS book. You can bet that all the made up shite in this book is going to come out sooner or later. Did you learn NOTHING from James Frey?