Tara Westover was 17 the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her “head-for-the-hills bag”. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father’s junkyard.

To be very honest here, I didn’t know anything about this book nor the author before going into this book. All I knew about this book was that it was very popular on Goodreads. Which might be the reason for the low rating I gave this book.

This review will be very unpopular. And this entire review is from my opinion, so if you don’t agree with anything I say here you don’t need to post some mean comments, you can just keep scrolling. This review is what I think about the book, and I know that not a lot of people will agree with me and you have to do the same just agree with the fact that not everyone will have the same opinion about as you.

I personally had very hard time reading this book because I found it boring and uninteresting but at the same time I couldn’t believe how hard time the author had while growing up in the family she has.

This book is for sure very eerie due to the emotional and physical abuse the author went through in her life on the hands of her family. Which really is terrifying how some people, who you call family can treat you like shit due to their’s believes.

Even thou I didn’t like this book, there is a part of me which doesn’t want to criticise a book of someone’s life.  But for a honest review you need to do some hard things.

This book only focused on the real bad things in the author’s life, and often skipped months at a time, which really annoyed me because its like the author is telling us that she her entire life was super bad without a single good things happening. 

And the sense of intense violence which were in this book were way too frequent. She really made me point how fucked up her family is with the first of these moments and we didn’t need 50 of them to understand it.

Another things which really annoyed me about this book, was the miracles of getting back to full head when her father, mother and brother got injured. It was like on one page they were very injured and on the next page they were back to full health. And the author didn’t even bother telling us how they got back to health or anything like this. It was more like Boom and the next morning they woken up being back to full health.

Other things which I found bad about this book was her school education. She was homeschooled until she was accepted to a university. And her education at home was very, very far from a proper education. All she learned during her home school was how to read and that was it. And when she was accepted to university she was on perfect student getting As on all tests and exams. How is that possible ? Someone who only learned how to read and do some very basic math which children in kindergarten can do is randomly an A student in a university. 

When I read nonfiction books or biographies I want logic and things making scenes not what happened with the author’s education in university or her family members randomly healing up over night after getting injured.

And the last thing I will mention about which really annoyed me about this book. Is that the author taken like 3 singing lessons and overnight she was the musician which everyone looked up to in town. It’s almost like the author wants us to believe that within 3 singing lessons you can go on a stage and be the next Taylor Swift.

I Give This Book 1 / 5