E Ellis Allen (girlonstilts.com)

I’ve been doing an awful lot of reading lately, so I’ve decided to combine two of the latest book reviews into one post.

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover: Book Review

When Tara went to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, she did so at the age of seventeen and without having stepped foot in a public classroom. The youngest of seven children, Tara was raised in the harsh Idaho backcountry by a mentally defective father (an anti-government, anti-modern medicine fundamentalist) and a neglectful mother.

Tara fought against her strict religious upbringing, her appointed placement in society as well as an abusive brother all to get a formal education. Even with her odds stacked against her—she’d never heard of the Holocaust—Westover went on to earn her B.A. and then a Ph.D. in History from Cambridge University, England.

Heartbreaking and intriguing, the memoir, Educated, by Tara Westover, is a haunting story of hope.

AND

 

I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley: Book Review

Sloane Crosley’s first book, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, is a compilation of personal essays about growing up and life in general.

Not told in chronological order but rather in a that-reminds-me kind of way by a hilarious friend, story after story will make you laugh until you cry.

Two of my favorite essays include Crosley, a Jewish girl, who is sent to a Christian girl’s camp every summer and the time in her twenties when she hosted a dinner party, and one of her guests left a turd on her carpet.

Fun, quick, and refreshing, it’s the type of book you read when you can’t go on vacation!