is an intimate, unsettling, and surprisingly tender account of a boy pulled from school into an improvised education built around his mother’s needs as much as his own. It combines vivid childhood scenes with adult reflection to explore love, isolation, and the long shadow of an unregulated homeschooling experiment.goodreads+4
Stefan is nine, a bright, sensitive kid in suburban Plano, Texas, when his mother withdraws him from public school, convinced that his teachers are “stifling his creativity” and that he is too delicate for the ordinary classroom.kirkusreviews+2
Homeschooling has only recently been legalized in Texas, and the lack of oversight means almost anything can count as a “lesson,” from flash cards to movie trips to aimless days at home.goodreads+1
What begins as an experiment in freedom and tailor-made education is quietly driven by his mother’s fear of losing him and her hunger for constant companionship.barnesandnoble+2
The heart of the memoir is Stefan’s complex bond with his mother: a woman who genuinely adores her son yet channels her love into control, proximity, and elaborate theories about his supposed genius.kirkusreviews+2
She is portrayed as volatile, imaginative, and often deeply unhappy, with behaviors that suggest untreated mental illness, though the book resists easy diagnoses or outright condemnation.bookmarks+2
Block writes from a child’s point of view infused with adult awareness, allowing the reader to feel his loyalty, guilt, and longing for her happiness even as her choices slowly constrict his world.chronogram+2
Day-to-day “school” is loosely structured: some math at the kitchen table, but otherwise a drifting curriculum made up of reading, drawing, TV, long afternoons, and intense one-on-one time with his mother.barnesandnoble+2
At first, the setup looks like freedom—no rigid schedule, no bullying classmates, no standardized tests—but it gradually shades into isolation and “an eerie, brutally lonely horror movie of a childhood,” as one review puts it.chronogram+2
The book quietly illustrates how unregulated homeschooling can enable neglect as easily as care: social development stalls, academic progress becomes patchy, and Stefan falls behind peers he no longer even sees.nypost+2
His mother’s educational “projects” can be bizarre but are grounded in her belief that she is helping him: she forces him to crawl around the house to “repattern” his body and improve his handwriting, and fixates on bleaching his hair back to baby blond to recapture his earlier years.goodreads+2
These episodes feel both absurd and deeply sad, dramatizing how her fear of his growing up translates into physical rituals meant to rewind or freeze time.kirkusreviews+2
Block’s tone remains notably restrained; he relates these scenes without ranting, inviting the reader to supply outrage while he stays focused on the emotional texture of being a child who wants to please his mother.bookmarks+2
Eventually, Stefan has to re-enter formal schooling, and the book traces how years at home leave him academically behind, painfully self-conscious, and vulnerable to social cruelty.nypost+2
The memoir touches on the challenges of catching up—struggling with coursework, navigating a high school environment marked by its own dark undercurrents—without turning into a simple “escape from a cult” narrative.goodreads+1
Rather than framing his life as a clean before/after story, Block shows how those homeschooling years remain present, shaping his sense of self and his ongoing relationship to his mother and to education itself.bookmarks+2
The prose is clear, observant, and quietly lyrical; Block uses present tense for much of the narrative, giving childhood memories an unnerving immediacy, as if they are still unfolding.tertulia+2
Major themes include parental love and possessiveness, the blurred boundary between care and harm, the psychology of giftedness, and the dangers of largely unregulated homeschooling systems.nypost+2
Reviews consistently highlight the book’s emotional balance: it is harrowing yet darkly funny in places, angry about systemic failures but reluctant to turn his mother into a simple villain.kirkusreviews+2
Homeschooled offers a rare inside view of homeschooling that is neither brochure-bright nor purely sensational; it is a nuanced case study of one family in which ideals, trauma, and need collide.nypost+2
For readers interested in education, psychology, or parent–child dynamics, the memoir provides rich material without devolving into policy screed or clinical report—it stays grounded in lived experience.chronogram+2
The book’s refusal to provide easy answers—Is homeschooling good or bad? Was his mother monstrous or desperate?—makes it especially resonant; it trusts readers to sit with ambiguity and moral complexity.bookmarks+2
Highly recommended for readers of memoirs like Tara Westover’s Educated or Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle: if those books appealed, this one offers a similarly compelling mix of dysfunction, resilience, and complicated love.kirkusreviews+2
It is particularly suited to readers who value nuance—those willing to engage with a narrator who neither excuses nor flatly condemns the adults who failed him.chronogram+2
Despite its painful material, Homeschooled is ultimately an absorbing, humane, and thought-provoking work that lingers; for anyone curious about the emotional realities behind the homeschooling debate, it is a standout, timely read.bookmarks+2