This book has been endlessly compared to The Glass Castle, and while the content is very similar (rural dysfunctional childhood, protagonist manages to get an education and have a successful career), there are also important differences. The most striking of these is the writing style. As an academic, Westover’s righting style is straight-forward and almost technical. As a historian, she is extremely concerned with factuality and the question of whose version of the past is right or can be trusted, which very much becomes a theme in the memoir. This is very different from the more lyrical prose of The Glass Castle, in which the reliability of the narrator is never questioned. I preferred the Glass Castle a little more stylistically, but found both works equally compelling in their own way. And I’ll be sitting with the very interesting questions raised in Educated for a long while.