Homeschooled: A Memoir by Stefan Merrill Block (audiobook)

 genre: memoir

Stefan’s early life with his parents and brother is practically idyllic. He knows he’s loved, he feels safe and secure, the world is a good place. But then, near the end of elementary school, they move from Indiana to Texas and his mom’s way of looking at reality starts shifting. She stops trusting institutions and starts mourning the loss of her little boy. And so she pulls him out of school and starts doing something that is still fairly eccentric: she homeschools him. And this is when Stefan’s life takes a turn that he and his family will never come back from.

Wow. I listened to this book in one stretch on a car ride from Maryland to New York and I was engaged from beginning to end. Engaged, horrified, stunned, all of it. His mom isn’t a horrific “abuser” but you can just watch the trauma and the disorganized attachment manifest itself. It is a hard look at homeschooling and the absolute necessity of making sure kids are protected from parents who willingly or not really can hurt their kids in all kinds of ways. If you liked Educated, I think you’d like this. Author reads his own audiobook and he did a fine job.