Not gonna lie, while I found most of Tara's recounting of her early life to be horrendously outrageous, I found about the first 60% of the book to be directionless. I couldn't quite determine what the point of this memoir was other than to expose the horrors of growing up in a fundamentalist family.

It wasn't until I'd reached past the early years of Westover's college life that this book began to strike a chord in me. As someone who grew up a staunch Mormon (although not the fundie kind) and who has since decided to distance myself from it, Tara's story became all-too-familiar. I found parallels in the unraveling of her of perception of the world with my own journey, and those parts were incredibly hard-hitting. Tara's story is not just one of triumph over one's past but is also one of loss—that is, losing one's family in the pursuit of a better, safer life. I have connected with this memoir in a manner I didn't quite anticipate and will be recommending it to others.