US author Stefan Merril Block has published three well received novels, and for ‘Home Schooled’ – a memoir of his early years – he’s also taken a novelistic approach. The results are utterly engrossing as he details his life growing up in Texas with his mother, father and older brother. It begins with the nine-year-old Stefan standing on the edge of a creek. He figures that if he throws himself off – and injures himself just enough so he breaks something minor – his mother will come to his aid and stop giving him the silent treatment that she’s been keeping up since yesterday over an argument over his untidy room. And it’s his mother that this book is largely about; that and her relationship with her younger son. It’s the early 90s. Pre-internet. But Stefan’s mother is something of a conspiracy theorist, and given to “ideas, which aren’t like other people’s.” She believes that modern medicine does more harm than good. She also believes that Stefan would learn more if he was home schooled. She pulls him out of the local school and sets about the task herself. This, however, often amounts to trips to the mall and letting Stefan read comics. At one point, she even instructs Stefan to crawl around the house because she thinks that he didn’t crawl enough as a toddler, and, according to what she’s read somewhere, crawling aids learning. ‘Home Schooled’ is a moving coming-of-age tale (the love between mother and son becomes evident), but it’s also very funny, and, eventually, inspiring as Stefan tries to plot a path of his own choosing. RM

Published by 

Hanover Square Press