I, Emma Freke pushes some of my buttons: homeschooling, family reunions, community. So let’s take them one at a time.

Homeschooling: Emma Freke, age twelve, has a mom, Donatella, who acts about fourteen. When Donatella decides to give Emma the birthday present of being homeschooled, the result is not pretty. Homeschooling is not a choice between child neglect and authoritarian scheduling in a school-like environment. It really is possible to have children who are free to learn at their own pace and even choose many of their own areas of study and who are also required to to be responsible and work at their education. And most people like Donatella don’t last long at homeschooling, which is what happens in the book. I also didn’t like the implication that people tend to homeschool in order to use their children as free labor as Donatella does when she leaves Emma to tend the bead shop. I know lots of homeschooling families, and none of them have their children at home in order to enslave them to the family’s business.

Family reunions: Emma attends a family reunion in Wisconsin in order to get away from her negligent, selfish mother and to meet the extended family of the father she’s never met. The entire Freke family is about as dysfunctional in the direction of controlling and domineering as Emma’s mom is in the opposite direction. In fact, The Freke family is so uptight and scheduled that they’re borderline unbelievable. Again, family is not usually a choice between a mother who’s so permissive that she should be hauled in for child neglect and a father’s family that’s so authoritarian that rebellion is the only option for anyone with a sense of self at all.

Community: The theme of the book is finding home, finding the place where you can fit in and feel accepted and loved for yourself. Emma, with her strange name and her height (six feet tall at age 12) and her advanced intellectual abilities and her odd family, doesn’t fit in anywhere. She’s not only a Freke, but she feels like a freak. And don’t we all sometimes? Especially young teens? This aspect of the story really communicated to me, and I felt as if the target audience, middle school readers, would identify, too.

I’m not sure about the portrayal of homeschooling as an alternate lifestyle for neglectful parents nor about the family reunion that’s too structured to be true, but the story transcends these lapses. The supporting cast in the book, Donatella, Aunt Pat Freke, Nonno, Emma’s grandfather, and others, all tend toward caricature. However, Emma Freke is a great character, and she deserves the happy ending that she gets at the end of the story.

I, Emma Freke is nominated for the 2010 Cybil Awards in the the Middle Grade Fiction category.