In Educated: A Memoir (Random House), she chronicles how she was able to transcend minimal home schooling and her restrictive upbringing to achieve academic success at Brigham Young University and the University of Cambridge. Growing up in an Idaho mountain landscape offered a beautiful sense of place for Tara Westover, but her strict Mormon fundamentalist family tempered nascent dreams. This isn't a good plan, but it propels him on a tough, compelling journey from Tucson to Mexico to Las Vegas in search of his own elusive place in the world. He's itchy to move beyond safety and prove himself as a boxer. In Willy Vlautin's novel Don't Skip Out on Me (HarperCollins), Horace Hooper is a lost young man living a hard but also secure life on a Northern Nevada ranch. Some of my favorite recent books have each deftly stretched the concept of place in different ways. When readers speak or write about "sense of place" in praising books, they often mean a particular landscape, but the phrase can also be-maybe always is to a degree-more fluid than that.
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