There is no doubt about the courage and strength of will the author exhibited in her voyage from abject rural poverty in Idaho to BYU, to a Masters and a Doctorate at Cambridge and a fellowship at Harvard. The book has been universally praised. Nonetheless, it has not been an easy read because of the horrible way her family treated her. It's difficult to imagine such verbal and physical abuse in what was purportedly a religious household. It's equally hard to understand how no one in America had standing to intervene in such a sordid tale. Tara did not even know her birthday when her mother got her a birth certificate at age nine. Her father was a deranged survivalist in southern Idaho, a Mormon extremist awaiting the end of days and the abomination the Illuminati would bring to the world. His children did not go to school or to doctors or dentists. He worked them in a scrapyard and nearly killed them in his safety be damned approach. Tara was operating a crane when she took the ACT's at 16. She was able to get into, and go to, BYU. She was overwhelmed by the noise, and was a complete babe-in-the-woods functioning in normal society. Nonetheless, she succeeded, graduated with honors and received a scholarship to Cambridge, England. In England, as in Provo, her life consisted of learning, growing and experiencing the world interspersed with trips home to revisit the surreal world of her family, where the violence and delusion continued. Her parents visited her at Harvard in an attempt to reconvert her to the righteous path. She was wiling to submit in order to earn back their love, but refused her father's priesthood blessing. She was shunned, returned to Cambridge and received her Doctorate. After a few attempts at reconciliation, she moved permanently away from her family and her history.
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