Book Review

Surviving the Applewhites, by Stephanie S. Tolan

Review by Jennifer Dees with her daughter, Miss C

First published 2003

I'd read that Surviving the Applewhites was a great book featuring an eccentric homeschooling family. Since my homeschooled daughter Miss C, 7, is a voracious reader, I'm constantly looking for new material at a high reading level but with age-appropriate content, and this seemed to fit the bill (it's recommended for age 10 and up). I handed it over to her along with several other new books.

As we set off on a car trip to do errands, I noticed she was immersed in a book. 'Ah, sweet,' I thought to myself, only to be abruptly taken aback when, within a span of five minutes, she had asked me, "Mom, what's marijuana?" and then, "What's suicidal?"

"WHAT are you reading?!" I countered.

It was Surviving the Applewhites. But in the context they were mentioned in the book, these words weren't as offensive as they first sounded to me (for a child of her mental age). After she had devoured the book, I read it myself, and loved it as much as she did.

Protagonist Jake Semple is a 13-year-old who has been kicked out of "all the schools in Rhode Island" and now out of the local school in a small town in North Carolina, where he has come to stay with his grandfather. He is said to have burned down a school in Rhode Island... after his parents were arrested for growing marijuana in their basement, and sent to separate prisons. Now he is coming to live with the Applewhites, homeschoolers who live near his grandfather in a rural area. 12-year-old E.D. Applewhite considers her family's willingness to accept him — scarlet hair, piercings, and all — a "suicidal" decision.

Here's what Miss C thought about the book:

I enjoyed the book. In a way, the Applewhites seemed like a real homeschooling family. They have a lot of kids, including a little boy named Destiny. He is really interested in how Jake spikes his hair and always has it colored scarlet. Of course, in the end, Jake doesn't have it that way any more.

Jake does a butterfly project. He has caterpillars and he's raising them up to be butterflies. He's feeding the butterflies a mixture they made that they dyed purple. The recipe said you could add dye. Destiny wants to dye his hair and spike it up.

He used wheat paste to spike his hair and it was all in clumps all over his head. Then he used the butterfly food to dye his hair purple. It looked really funny, I bet. I know it's hard to imagine all this.

E.D., the girl in the story, has been trying to catch a fritillary butterfly for a long, long time. Finally, Jake finds a dead one stuck on the grill of her Uncle Archie's car. E.D. was not very happy about that.

Jake goes from lots of earrings, scarlet hair, and spiked, to brown hair, not spiked, no earrings, and much nicer. The dog, Winston, likes him too. He learned a lot from being with the Applewhites. And he sort of gets a girlfriend, too. Her name is Jeannie and they are in The Sound of Music together. She plays Liesl and he is Rolf.

When I first read author Tolan's description of the Applewhites' "home school," I was skeptical that she would get homeschooling right, especially when she wrote that it was "really more of an unschool." But I granted her some leeway as I read because I knew she was writing for the masses, not just homeschoolers (the book was a Newbery Honor Book and a New York Times Bestseller). By the end of the book, I felt that she had really gotten it right, especially in spirit — even if the Applewhites are more interesting, eccentric, creative, and chaotic than most of us homeschooling families. I liked the fact that the parents are both flawed and yet wonderful... it made them much more real.

Any homeschooler reading chapter books — and his or her parents — will enjoy this book.

Surviving the Applewhites by Stephanie S. Tolan is available from Amazon.com.

See also our review of A Time to Fly Free by Stephanie S. Tolan.

Jennifer Dees has given up trying to keep up with her daughter in reading books, and hopes most of what she encounters will be as delightful as this book.