Just perfect. This book met and exceeded my high expectations. It is a skillfully woven family saga that takes you through several generations of two lines of the same family. The stories proceed in chronological order, alternating between the two family lines, one in present-day Ghana, and the other in the United States due to the slave trade. Each story totally captured my attention and every character felt whole and complete despite the fragmented nature of the book. I could have read an entire novel about any one of the characters, but I actually felt each story greatly benefited from being placed within the larger framework of the family story. It was a moving, educational, spiritual, compelling work. I don’t think I could say enough good things.

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.