Seven, and the missing three are all after Cambridge.

My sister posted me this with a note saying it would explain our mother. It didn't explain our mother. I put that first because I think a lot of people arrive to this book wanting it to explain somebody, and then are cross with the book when no explanation comes.

For two thirds I couldn't leave it alone. The mountain, the scrapyard, the drums of fuel, the father and his end of days, the brother who is genuinely dangerous, the injuries treated with herbs and pure stubbornness. All told without decoration. There isn't an adjective in there pleading with me to feel something; the events do the pleading and they do it well. I read the second car crash twice, not because I failed to follow it but because I didn't believe how calm the sentences stayed.

Then Cambridge arrives and something goes soft.

I've thought about why since February and I don't believe it's dishonesty. It's a problem of distance. On the mountain she's a child and she can look at that child from outside, with pity, with a coldness which is really mercy. At university she's nearly the woman writing the book and she can't get far enough away, so the prose starts explaining itself. She tells us what things meant. Several paragraphs read like the last page of an essay about herself, and I didn't want the essay. I wanted the room. The wrong clothes, the wrong words, not knowing what the Holocaust was — and then the shame about the not knowing.

Second complaint, and here I'm probably being unfair. There are notes where the family disagrees about what happened. I understand why. A memoirist who leaves those out is asking for trouble. But each time one appeared I stopped being inside the story and became a person weighing evidence, and those are two different jobs. My husband says that's precisely her intention, that the book is about not trusting the record of your own life. Possibly. Or is that simply a good excuse for a soft last third? He's often right and it irritates me, either way.

The Spanish is Una educación, translated by Antonia Martín, and here's a small thing which bothers me and probably nobody else. Educated in English is a past participle sitting there passively, something done to her, done at her. Una educación is a noun, a thing acquired. Spanish has no comfortable route to the English title and I don't blame the translator at all, but that difference in grammar isn't nothing, and Spanish readers begin one step to the side of the book.

What stays with me, months later, is neither the mountain nor Cambridge. It's Tyler. The brother who left first and quietly, without a fight, and then wrote to her. She refuses to make a hero of him and that restraint is the best decision in the book. Also the mother's oils. Also the moment the father's hands are burnt and everyone in the room knows what should be done and nobody does it.

There's also the grandmother in Arizona, who barely appears and who I kept waiting for. A whole alternative life sitting two states away, offered once and then never again. Whether she's underwritten or deliberately kept small I genuinely can't tell, and it may be that those are the same thing.

Seven, then. Seven looks mean written down and I nearly changed it. But I read a lot of memoir, my mother-in-law gives me one every Christmas whether I want it or not, and the ones I return to are the ones which stay inside the scene. This one steps out of the scene to talk to me. A very good book which becomes a slightly less good book at the exact moment its subject gets free, and I can't decide whether that's a flaw or simply the honest shape of what happened to her.

One practical thing, because this is a book people lend. Don't lend it to someone in the middle of a bad stretch with their family. My friend Pilar read it during a fight with her father and she hasn't discussed it since, except to say she wished she'd waited, and Pilar is not a woman who wishes she'd waited about anything, so I took notice.

Anyway. I have it in both languages and I'm keeping both, which for a seven tells you something. The notebook entry for February says only this: the mountain, yes. The rest, hmm.