MixedThe Wall Street Journal\"The power to leave her warped family of origin and move forward into her own adult life: This is the education of Ms. Westover’s title. Which was something of a letdown to me, the reader. I don’t mean to minimize the distance Ms. Westover has traveled. But other children of paranoid conspiracists, not to mention children of alcoholics and children of bipolar parents, have also managed to emerge from the toxic fantasy. On the other hand, almost no one encounters formal education for the first time at 18 and immediately becomes a scholar. Ms. Westover doesn’t seem to have any sense of how remarkable that journey is ... Educated is fascinating, and it’s probably unfair of me to carp at a memoirist who wrote her life story by age 30 for not having sufficient insight. But this hole in her explanations is a huge and intriguing one.\
