Homeschooled
A Read with Jenna Pick: A Memoir
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A READ WITH JENNA TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK • A heartbreaking, empowering, often hilarious debut memoir about a mother’s all-consuming love, a son’s perilous quest to discover the world beyond the front door and the unregulated homeschool system that impacts millions like him
*A Top 10 Amazon Book of the Month Pick*
*A Washington Post Book to Read in January!*
*A Library Journal Big Book of the Week!*
*A BookRiot Best New Nonfiction of January!*
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were “stifling his creativity.” Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family’s living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother’s erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen.
Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother’s increasingly eccentric theories and projects. But when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.
At once a novelistic portrait of mother and son, and an illuminating window into an overlooked corner of the American education system, Homeschooled is a moving, funny and ultimately inspiring story of a son’s battle for a life of his own choosing, and the wages of a mother’s insatiable love.
Praise for Homeschooled
"One of the most beautiful books I've ever read."—Jenna Bush Hager
“Absorbing.”—Washington Post
“A revealing and deeply empathetic portrait of a complex relationship between mother and son.” –BookPage, starred review
“Astonishing.”—The New York Post
"Clearly told with the steadiness of a masterful writer."—Isaac Fitzgerald
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Block (Life Lessons) delivers a wrenching account of his traumatic homeschooling in suburban Texas. Block's eccentric, emotionally fragile mother convinced him at a young age that he would be "the next Charles Dickens," and homeschooled him beginning at age nine in an attempt to protect him from being stifled by a traditional education. Her insistence on "rescuing" Block's creativity led to bizarre pedagogical experiments, including forcing him to crawl like a baby to test his motor control at age 12. Though he occasionally excelled, especially in math, Block paints a portrait of a childhood warped by codependency and unmet emotional needs. "Mom wanted only to hide away with everything she held dear," he writes, theorizing that this yearning was instilled in her by a childhood bout with polio. "It was exactly that hiding, and that holding too close, that took everything from her." He resists sensationalism or blanket indictments of homeschooling, but his testimony offers a sobering glimpse into what lobbyists have wrought by convincing politicians to strip away federal oversight in the name of "parental freedom." Lyrical, harrowing, and politically pointed, this is both a moving coming-of-age story and a clarion call for reform.
