Educated By Tara Westover

After finishing my second book of 2019 I'm not sure what to say.

Tara Westover's writing is beautiful and there were times that the book was impossible to put down. This memoir reinforced my knowledge that writing nonfiction is exactly what I want to do with my life.

But there was one scene that hurt my nonfiction-writing-heart, specifically the dialogue of the scene. I am speaking, of course, of the roof scene. If you have read the book, I'm sure you know exactly what I'm talk about. And if you haven't read the book, this won't spoil anything and you will know exactly what I mean when you reach the scene. The dialogue in this scene sounds nothing like the way actual people talk, and reads as if it was exposition and a few quotation marks were added for no real reason. And since the rest of the writing is beautiful, I'm going to blame Tara Westover's editors for this one. It seems like she was told that she needed dialogue here and wasn't given the time to get the dialogue to the same level as the rest of the work. Which is unfortunate and reinforces my great fear of dialogue in nonfiction (it can go so wrong so easily). And, since I seem to choose some kind of hill to die on in each of these reviews, this is the end of this particular hill.

Despite all of my complaints about two pages of dialogue, this book was really beautiful and lovely to read. It's an important story that is told well. It's deals with some really difficult topics without negating how difficult those topics are.

I would recommend this book, it's a pretty quick read and it flowed beautifully so I just wanted to keep going until there was nothing more to read. I do have two warnings for potential readers. First, there is a whole lot of second-hand embarrassment throughout the memoir, so if that's something that you have a hard time dealing with, then maybe this isn't the right book for you. And second, this book does talk about fairly violent abuse, so if that's a topic that is difficult for you to encounter then I would recommend you find something else to read (and I'm full of recommendations if you want any).

So, there you go! The second review of the year! I haven't fallen off the wagon yet, so that's a pretty good sign :) Let me know what you think of my reviews and please let me know if there is anything specific you would like to see in future reviews!

XO, Ellen