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A Memoir
by Stefan Merrill Block
A heartbreaking, empowering and 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.
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.
"Lyrical, harrowing, and politically pointed, this is both a moving coming-of-age story and a clarion call for reform." —Publishers Weekly
"Like Tara Westover's Educated, a compelling and horrifying account, leavened with flashes of rueful humor." —Kirkus Reviews
"Through this poignant memoir that seamlessly blends humor, anger, and sadness, readers will appreciate Block's journey from homeschooling to adulthood." —Booklist
"Block presents his boyhood without vanity or fear or illusions and paints his broken, delusional mother with nothing but love. Painful, funny, honest, heartbreaking. Nothing less than a sensational book." —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less Is Lost
"Stefan Merrill Block has penned a coming-of-age saga for the ages. A smart, deep boy growing up in the suicide capital of Texas, Block was taken hostage by a needy mother under the guise of homeschooling. His escape into high school, college, and a literary life in New York is a moving page-turner, in turns hilarious and compassionate, furious and faithful. Anybody with a mama needs to read this. Bravo!" —Mary Karr, New York Times bestselling author of The Liars' Club
This information about Homeschooled was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stefan Merrill Block is an American author known for his novels and memoir, Homeschooled. He was born in 1982 in Plano, Texas, and now lives in upstate New York. His work explores themes of family, memory, mental illness, and the complexities of human relationships.
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