This post reviews Lucy Frank, The Homeschool Liberation League
Frank, author of seven young adult titles, here offers a delightful contribution to the growing genre of children’s literature with homeschooled characters.
Kaity Antonucci is the only child of two Connecticut working-class parents. She is a funny, popular girl at school, often instigating minor conspiracies against the authorities. But the summer before her eighth grade year she, against her parents’ wishes, had entered and won an essay contest providing a scholarship to “Wilderness Discovery Camp.” There she met people who were genuinely interested in things–a Russian scientist/counselor who called her Katya, a mature and compelling homeschooled girl named Rosie. Kaity decided that she was going to be her real self instead of her fake, popular, slightly cruel school self.
But she cannot. School drags her back into her old ways. Chapter 1 of Frank’s book reads, in its entirety, “The first day of eighth grade, I took the bus to school, walked through the door, turned around, and went home.”
The rest of the book chronicles Kaity’s effort to become Katya, to transform herself from the shallow school tart she was to the curious naturalist she wants to be. Along the way there are many hurdles, starting with a strong aversion to homeschooling from her conventional parents, who call themselves “school kind of people” (p.203) and her grandfather, who thinks homeschooling is “for hippies and communists.” (p.29) But Katya draws strength from her camp friends, a lively elderly man who visits her mom’s salon to get his arthritic feet treated, woodland critters and vegetation, and a mysterious boy named Milo who plays his violin out in the woods.
Of all the recent children’s books I’ve read involving homeschooled characters, Frank’s goes furthest in making homeschooling itself central to the plot. Camp friend Rosie introduces Katya to the possibility of “unschooling.” Milo’s homeschooling father Preston explains at one point to Katya’s parents,
most parents I’ve known tend to start out with a ’school at home’ model. But in my experience, most don’t stick with it…. The average homeschooling family changes their style of home-schooling seven times in the first two years. So I wouldn’t feel bad about not knowing what you’re doing…. There are as many methods and philosophies of homeschooling as there are families. You do whatever works best, for your beliefs and your life. What my wife and I’ve settled on over the years is an eclectic, mix-and-match approach. (p.194)
Here and elsewhere in the book Frank’s depictions of homeschooling ring true. Her protagonists, Katya and Milo, are not only well-drawn, complex young people, but the social world they’re inhabiting, the world of Connecticut homeschooling, is believable. Frank’s narrative gives us real families where homeschooling is neither panacea nor scourge–it is a complex endeavor requiring sacrifices and compromises, generating conflict among parents, children and extended family even as it brings people together in shared endeavor. It can be liberating and isolating, rewarding and punishing. Frank captures all of this beautifully.
I emailed Lucy Frank asking her where her interest in and experience with homeschooling came from and she responded that the homeschooling theme was actually her editor’s idea. Responding to her editor’s suggestion, Frank immersed herself in homeschool websites, how-to guides, critiques of public education, and first person accounts. “And when,” she writes, “I met a girl, now in college, who told me she’d begged her parents to take her out of school because all she’d learned that year was how to shake hands and throw a ball, I knew I had my subject.” Frank herself, though valedictorian of her class, felt like all she really learned at school was how to play “the game of school.” She writes, “I wish someone had told me that I didn’t have to play the game, that there were other ways to go.”
The only note missing in her book, and here the book is exactly like all of the others I’ve reviewed, is the religious dimension. While it is true that a substantial percentage of Connecticut homeschoolers are motivated less by religion than by other factors, even in New England many homeschoolers are conservative Christians. Frank’s characters are believable: Rosie’s lesbian professional parents, Milo’s stage father, and Katya’s independent-minded but reluctant working class parents are all types that anyone with much experience in the homeschool world will immediately recognize. And given the self-segregation within the homeschool community [in CT the conservative Christians tend to join TEACH and the "inclusives" tend to join CHN. Local support groups are often segregated along religions lines as well], it is not implausible that parents like Milo’s and Rosie’s wouldn’t have much contact with religious conservatives. But it is a dimension I would have liked to have seen worked in somehow.
Two final points to make about the book. This is a young adult title. Frank’s characters do a lot of text messaging, internet messaging, talking on cell phones, and so on, all reproduced in the book, giving it an almost multi-media feel. It’s also written about and for young teen girls. Frank nails the confusion and emotional volatility of young adolescence, as well as the occasionally coarse language (actually quite restrained–strong PG to mild PG-13) and dawning sexual awakenings of the teenage years (also restrained, but her descriptions of the emotional electricity of a first and second kiss are not to be missed!). This is not, in the end, a book about homeschooling. It’s a book about a 13-year-old girl trying to overcome the faux identity foisted on her by the school context, searching out a self and a voice she can believe in. Homeschooling is just the tool she uses to get there.
Thanks very much for this very detailed review of Frank’s book, including your email conversation with her. I’m definitely going to read the book now.
I’m curious about the missing “religious dimension” you note in many if not all homeschool novels. I wonder if it’s the author or the editor/publisher who omits it. Since Frank immersed herself in the homeschooling world in preparing to write the book, it would have been a challenge for her to escape noting how religion is so much a part of modern homeschooling for many people.
Maybe it was too big a topic for Frank’s novel or would have detracted from other important elements of the story, or perhaps her treatment of it might have alienated some of the potential readership. [reviewing your link to your previous commentary on this subject, I see you've considered all these questions before.]
Perhaps you’ll have to write that YA homeschool novel incorporating the religious dimension, Prof. Gaither.
Betsy
In her email Ms. Frank agreed with me that conservative Christian homeschooling would be wonderful subject matter for young adult fiction. I’m not sure if I have the talent for that sort of writing, but she certainly does. Maybe her next book will take it on!
Thanks, Professor Gaither for your thoughtful and appreciative review. I wish your book had been out back when I was doing my research! I will definitely read it now.
I want to make clear that I wasn’t under any pressure to stay away from the “religious dimension” in homeschooling. Nor was I motivated by worry about alienating readers (except possibly school principals, with my extremely unflattering portrayal of Katya’s dreaded Mr. Westenburg). Rather, as Betsy says above, it’s too big a topic just to mention in passing. At one point early on I tried bringing in characters representing different sides of the homeschooling world, but the book started to feel like “a book about homeschooling,” instead of the story of one girl’s determination not to let school squash her enthusiasm for learning and mold her into someone she doesn’t want to be, and the effect that has on everyone in her life.
[...] Gordon Korman’s Schooled, Susan Juby’s Alice MacLeod series, and Lucy Frank’s Homeschool Liberation League. In each of these works as well the homeschooling family or child has been motivated by a desire [...]
I’m not sure why religion is a dimension that should be included in any or even most treatments of home education, nor am I sure that it’s that much of a challenge to “escape” writing about religion – and it appears what’s really meant here is “Christianity”, which is one of many religions– in books of which homeschooling is a part.
While Christianity is clearly an important part of modern homeschooling for many home educators, it plays a far more significant role in parental choices to homeschool, than it often does for the youth being homeschooled. And there are increasingly many, many people of different religions – Hindu, Muslim, Jewish — and those of spiritual persuasions that don’t fall neatly into mainstream faith traditions.
I think the reason so many books that include homeschooling identify the choice as a way to encourage deeper individuality is because, ultimately, that’s what we’re all doing. We’re choosing to homeschool so our children can grow up literally liberal – not politically, but spiritually and emotionally liberated– free – to learn and worship in the family’s chosen faith, to learn without faith, to fully experience and develop a particular interest, skill or talent, to indulge wonderment.
With respect to Ms. Frank’s purposes, though, the day to day world of young women, wherever they go to school, is full of other, more pressing issues, and identity is a huge one with which girls of any faith can identify. Because Ms. Frank did not make this “a book about homeschooling” or a book about “religious” or “Christian” homeschooling, I can comfortably recommend it to our nearly 1100 member Unitarian Universalist homeschooling group, and equally well to both Christian and secular homeschoolers, and to friends with children in public schools, too.
She has wisely found the common ground all young girls stand on at some point or another, and delivered a story everyone can share in.
Hi, Theresa.
Nice to “see” you here.
I think the reason I find the religious dimension inescapable is because it affects relationships among homeschoolers where we live (north central WV) at a very basic level. I’ve corresponded with people who are wary of homeschoolers because they think we are all conservative Christians, so my correspondents who are not conservative Christians wonder whether homeschooling is for them.
While I do agree that the religious dimension might not figure much at all in a child’s life, it might be more accurate to say that it really does, but at a level they might not be aware of, at least until they are older (teen years), because it does affect which groups they affiliate with, here anyway. Just one example: one teen girl from a conservative Christian family joined our eclectic group of Jewish, Christian, and non-Christian families, but she was very uncomfortable with the conversations of the other teens. She ended up leaving the group and found a much more agreeable (to her) bunch of teens in another local group for conservative Christians. Here conservative Christian homeschool families tend to hang out together and “the rest of us” (which includes devout Christians some of whom are lesbian) are more comfortable in groups where statements of faith are sometimes required to exclude people of other beliefs, or no faith.
Also, I’m not sure that the conservative Christians I know would be open to their children reading such a book because of the coarse language Prof. Gaither mentioned, as well as the lesbian characters. There is strong anti-gay sentiment among the conservative Christians I know here. They say that is one reason they homeschool, to protect their children from those sorts of influences. They speak longingly (?) of books published prior to 1960, describing them as the type of literature that has the type of values they want to convey to their children.
It sounds like homeschooling is very different in FL.
Betsy
Nice to see you, too, Betsy.
What you describe happens here as well, to varying degrees, at various times. My point was strictly a literary one; that just because a young adult book includes homeschooling as part of the environment, or even as a major situational element, doesn’t mean it should automatically include religion, or specifically Christianity, anymore than fictional books about public school experiences should, or do.
And there’s certainly no shortage of contemporary young adult Christian fiction. Search on those words at Amazon.com and you get a healthy list of options.
I think there’s enough of everything for everyone, and plenty of opportunities for people to create their own works of art and literature through resources like Lulu.com, as well. It’s a brave new world.
Thank you for this review. With all due respect to the author — and let me make it clear that I have not read the book — the section you quote in which a father explains homeschooling sounds to me as if it came from a generic “how-to-homeschool” web site. It does not sound as if a real homeschooler were telling someone else about the homeschooling, or unschooling, life. Real hs’ers and us’ers communicate with energy and enthusiasm; the experience of pursuing education in a non-traditional manner is a large part of who they are, and they love to share anecdotes and personal revelations.
Also, in response to your mention of the lack of a religious dimension: I do not homeschool for religious reasons, yet, when my child was younger, we belonged to a Christian homeschooling network — for the sense of community. I found, however, that I did not develop any close relationships with the other mothers — not because we had different feelings about the importance of religion, but because their conversations mostly centered on curriculum and discipline issues. I do not wish to generalize that all religious homeschoolers have that focus, but in my experience it was the norm.
Therefore, I find it plausible that a homeschooler/unschooler might have little contact with religious homeschoolers. My contact with them has diminished over the years to the point where I now have no contact with them, although they are quite prevalent in my state. I have found that unschoolers are also quite prevalent in my state: they just tend to stay beneath the radar.
Excellent review! I linked to it at my blog.