Tara Westover, EDUCATED

Compelling, insightful, nuanced, and at times heartbreaking. Westover grew up in a fundamentalist household in Idaho, with a bipolar father; she didn't attend school until BYU at age 16; she worked in a dangerous scrap yard (a good metaphor for her scrappy, isolated life). Perhaps the most illuminating moment in the book is when she asks (sincerely) in a college lecture hall what "Holocaust" means, and someone tells her not to joke about it. She holds the tensions, the gray areas, rather than dispelling them. I read it in one day, didn't want to put it down. Recalls other well-written memoirs, particularly DON'T LETS GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT and GLASS CASTLE.