Homeschooled
Read by
Stefan Merrill Block
Release:
01/06/2026
Runtime:
7h 10m
Unabridged
Quantity:
“Absorbing…[Block] succeeds at the near-impossible task of narrating from a child’s perspective without sounding like an adult in miniature… He manages to capture his frightening, formidable mother in all her ambivalent glory…Her love for Block is scalding in its intensity, and she is tragic precisely because she is so eminently understandable.”
Washington Post
A BookPage Best Book of the Month
An Amazon Bestseller
A Today Show Read with Jenna Pick
A Washington Post Pick of the Month
A BookRiot Pick of the Month's Best Books
A Library Journal Editor’s Pick of the Week
A Barnes & Noble Pick of the Month's Best Audiobooks
A heartbreaking and empowering 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.” With no background in education and no formal training, 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. She forced him to bleach his hair and to crawl like a baby in a strange and regressive attempt to recapture his early years.
Long 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 all-consuming love.
Stefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were “stifling his creativity.” With no background in education and no formal training, 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. She forced him to bleach his hair and to crawl like a baby in a strange and regressive attempt to recapture his early years.
Long 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 all-consuming love.
Release:
2026-01-06
Runtime:
7h 10m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781488237102
Publisher:
Harlequin Audio
Praise