A Review of Guest Hollow by a Harvard Graduate and Her Mother

It is possible to raise your children with a desire to pursue excellence without compromising on educational quality in your family’s homeschooling.

Faith, integrity, and academic excellence do not have to be mutually exclusive! That being said, what that will look like is different to each family, and an Ivy League education is not the right choice for everyone.

However, for homeschool graduate Campbell Rutherford, Guest Hollow was just what she needed to encourage her academically, and she graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Applied Mathematics with an application in Biological Sciences.

Below are thoughts she and her mother shared with us about using Guest Hollow curricula.

Liza’s daughter Campbell and her younger sister standing in front of Campbell’s freshman dorm at Harvard

Review by Liza Rutherford (the mother of the graduate)

The first year we were homeschooling, my daughter was reading her social studies textbook in the car during a commute. She was confused as she read about how our corner of the world, “Isn’t a good area for farming,” as we drove by fields of crops at that very moment.

This misinformation motivated me to regroup and redirect our homeschool away from traditional textbooks by leaning into doing our own research. It worked great!

(My daughter is) an avid reader and loves to deep dive, but it was a lot of work on my end finding resources. Thankfully, we discovered Guest Hollow after years of curating our own booklists, documentaries, movies, and YouTube videos to cover science and social studies! We used Guest Hollow Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Anatomy as well as American History and World Geography and Cultures over the next 5 years.

Guest Hollow was a great fit for her! She fell down many rabbit holes of research. After completing American History Year 1, she sat for the AP US History and the AP Government and Politics exams and scored very well! (Guest Hollow’s Government and Year 2 of American History hadn’t been released yet.) The next year, she took biology for STEM majors at a local college and won their Life Sciences Student of the Year Award.

Campbell and her dad (Mike) doing a lab for Guest Hollow’s Physics curriculum

Prior to Guest Hollow, she thought she might study engineering, but she fell in love with biology after completing (Guest Hollow’s Biology) curriculum. Ultimately, she followed that passion, majoring in Applied Mathematics on the biological sciences track at Harvard.

While at Harvard, she often noted that books and topics that she studied with (Guest Hollow) were mentioned in class, and she even had professors who were homeschooling their own kids ask her what curriculum we used.

Though Guest Hollow isn’t advertised as overly rigorous, it certainly can be when your kids love to deep dive and research. It’s thorough and interesting, not dry and vague as so many traditional textbooks tend to be.

Campbell at her desk in her dorm showing us her chemistry models that she used in her Life and Physical Sciences A class during her first year at Harvard.

The exposure to so many viewpoints through various content creators and authors builds an impressive knowledge base for students to refer to in interviews and conversations with admissions, peers, professors, and possible employers.

There are many times when I hear my daughter say, “Oh, I read a book about that!” and then can sincerely recommend it, actually contributing to the conversation, versus, “We learned about that in high school biology,” which really doesn’t productively feed the discussion.

I also like to recommend Guest Hollow to homeschoolers with print disabilities. With the amount of reading required, I know that sounds counterintuitive. But students with print disabilities like dyslexia and blindness qualify for free digital/audio libraries like Bookshare and BARD, which contain almost all of the suggested books in the (Guest Hollow) curricula.

My daughter is blind and braille homeschool curricula basically do not exist, so we were often stuck using old public school textbooks or me reading homeschool textbooks aloud to her. But with her iPhone/iPad and a screen reader, she could access pretty much every Guest Hollow schedule and assignment independently. She also trained her ear to listen to her readings at the rate of 600 words per minute, which is a huge advantage in college!

Needless to say, we are huge fans. I truly cannot recommend Guest Hollow enough!

Harvard decision day photo of Campbell laying on all of her college acceptance mail.

Review by Campbell Rutherford (a Harvard graduate)

“This is stupid,” I thought as I slogged my way through my high school biology textbook. As I read it, I somehow felt as if I were simultaneously attempting to comprehend senseless gibberish and reading something written for five-year-olds by an adult who hated children.

Perhaps I am being unfair to the authors of my textbook, but to say that their writings did not captivate me would be an understatement bordering on dishonesty. I felt sure that, if this was what biology was like, I was not going to like it at all.

Eight years later, I wrote my senior thesis on risk factors of interstitial lung disease across six systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases using a large biomedical dataset, and I graduated from Harvard with a degree in Applied Mathematics with an application in Biological Sciences. My hunch that I was not going to like biology was, it seems, mistaken.

Rest assured, my newfound interest in biology did not come from the textbook, which remained as dull as ever. Rather, it came through a new learning approach altogether. After I had complained to her about my boredom, my mom had the bright idea of abandoning the textbook and learning biology through real books instead.

We had done it in previous years for history and social studies, so why not for biology as well? The problem was trying to find enough books that would cover all of the necessary topics and that would be interesting to read and discuss.

Fortunately, we discovered Guest Hollow, which had done the work for us and provided a carefully-curated list of books, both fiction and nonfiction, that covered everything from ecology to epidemiology.

Campbell, her mother, and younger sister doing a lab for Guest Hollow’s World Geography and Cultures curriculum

I was an avid reader if there ever was one, so I dove in enthusiastically. Soon enough, I was reconsidering my plans to study engineering in college and looking into fields like epidemiology and biostatistics, before COVID got everyone interested in such fields, I might add.

I loved Guest Hollow’s Biology curriculum so much that we used their curricula for Chemistry, American History, Government, Physics, Anatomy, and Geography as well. I enjoyed them all, and I believe that I came away from each of them with a more thorough understanding of the subject, as well as more enjoyment of it, than I ever could have gained through textbooks.

Furthermore, some of the books that I read for Guest Hollow have joined the ranks of my all-time favorites, and I often return to them when I need a good reread. For families of bookworms, and even for families who just want something more interesting than textbooks, I would highly recommend checking out Guest Hollow. If you’re anything like me, I am confident that you will not be disappointed.

Interested in the Guest Hollow curriculums Campbell used as a homeschooler? Check out each at the links below, and use the discount code HARVARD for 5% off of any purchase, valid through September 2nd, 2026, Pacific Time. (This discount code cannot be used in conjunction with other coupons.)

Guest Hollow’s High School Biology

Guest Hollow’s Chemistry in the Kitchen

Guest Hollow’s History Curriculum

Guest Hollow Government, Economics, and Personal Finance

Guest Hollow’s High School Conceptual (Math-Free) Physics

Guest Hollow’s High School Anatomy and Health

Guest Hollow’s High School Geography and Cultures

Note: the reviews and photos used in this blog post are shared with permission.