A 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.
Absorbing ... His memoir is less an indictment of home schooling in general than a vivid portrait of the way the practice failed one child in particular. Block makes brief note of the regulatory vacuum that allowed his predicament, but for the most part he writes with the phenomenological precision and narrative verve of a novelist ... It is fitting that Homeschooled is narrated in the present tense. Evidently, Block’s childhood memories are still possessed of a sharp immediacy. The past is never really over for someone subjected to such scarring humiliations during his formative years.
A compelling and fitfully harrowing child’s-eye account of a mother’s unravelling ... Homeschooled paints a bleak account of a derailed childhood, but it isn’t a revenge story. It’s about a child failed by both his parents, a neglectful education system and the long, hard road to normality.
Homeschooling doesn’t enjoy the best reputation ... Homeschooled is unlikely to change that perception ... Accompanies Block well beyond secondary school and into adulthood ... With each milestone, he moves closer to reconciliation and, in the memoir’s more saccharine moments, appreciation for the extreme mother–son dynamic that tethered him even as it gave him wings.
