5 Great Books with Homeschooled Main Characters

One thing I remember from my own school days is how much I loved stories about other kids in school. There are so many shared experiences: eating in the cafeteria and worrying about dropping your tray (which I totally did in 7th grade and still cringe when I think about it), being bored during a lecture (hello 9th grade world history), and forgetting your lunchbox at the end of the day. (I did that a lot.) Reading books about other kids made my experiences feel like part of something bigger.

As homeschoolers, we don’t get as much of that — but that’s changing, and more books featuring homeschoolers are popping up on the library shelves. Some of them don’t paint the best pictures of homeschooling (I’m looking at you, Gordon Korman’s Schooled), but these books get it right.

A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty

Madeleine and her friends Jack and Belle are homeschooling high school with the help of their parents and friends, studying science and history, for example, with Jack’s granddad and literature with Madeleine’s mom. I love how matter-of-factly homeschooling is presented here — it’s just the way they learn, and it gives Madeleine space to do some independent investigating when she discovers a mysterious crack connecting our world to the Kingdom of Cello in an alternate universe. 

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Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott

Orphaned Rose gets into homeschooling because of her guardian Uncle Alec’s “new-fangled” 19th century ideas about what people actually need to know. Instead of translating Latin verbs and learning to sketch landscapes, he signs Rose up for cooking and sewing lessons with her aunts, turns history, literature, and science into story time, and encourages her to spend lots of time being active outdoors. This homeschooling proves to be an essential piece of Rose growing up to be a smart, competent young woman.

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Ida B: . . . and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and (Possibly) Save the World by Katherine Hannigan

I don’t love books about homeschoolers who go back to school because they’re usually all about how hard it is for homeschoolers to adapt to the school environment (which isn’t necessarily realistic) or how much better school ends up being than home. I feel like Ida B gets this right, though — Ida B has to go back to school when her mom learns she has cancer. Ida B is understandably upset — homeschooling has been great for her — but it’s clear that her struggles to adjust to a 4th grade classroom aren’t because she was homeschooled but because she is juggling a lot of big feelings. Ida B isn’t a quirky person because she’s a homeschooler — she’s a quirky person who also happens to be homeschooled.

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Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan

What I love about the depiction of homeschooling in this book is that it makes it clear that when it comes to homeschooling, one size does not fit all. Her family is a bunch of freewheeling, unschooling artists, but E.D. wants structure, schedules, and labeled binders — and that’s totally okay. The story focuses on Jake, a kid in foster care who lands with the Applewhites and discovers himself in the process, but the depiction of homeschool life is warm and inclusive.

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The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan

Okay, the action in this book gets to be a little bit of a slog three-quarters of the way through (and the end is fun again), but co-narrator Carter is a homeschooled kid who has grown up learning with his Egyptologist dad. Carter has experienced the cool part of homeschooling (traveling the world while he learns about the world), but he’s still a little jealous of his sister, who has had a more traditional school experience, which seems to ring true. He also finds himself pitted against an ancient Egyptian god to save his dad, so all that homeschool learning comes in handy.

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