Homeschooled

‘A love story and a domestic horror story’ Michael Cunningham‘A compelling and fitfully harrowing child’s-eye account of a mother’s unravelling’ The GuardianStefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school in Plano, Texas, certain that his teachers were ‘stifling his creativity’. Years before homeschooling became a nationwide movement in the US, Stefan vanished from the system and into his mother’s increasingly eccentric theories and projects – including her quest to bleach her 12-year-old son’s hair to recapture his earliest years, and to make him crawl not walk. Beyond his formal lessons in maths, he was largely left to his own devices academically, leaving vast gaps in his knowledge.

When, after five years away from the outside world, he re-entered the school system, 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 US 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 price of a mother’s insatiable love.