Book Review: Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli

I’m a little late to the party on this one, I know. This book was published over ten years ago and has become a touchstone of YA literature. I finally got around to reading it because, when I was doggedly trying to discover the name of a book I had read and loved as a kid, I kept Googling “YA novel non-conformist” and kept getting Stargirl as the result instead of the book I was really looking for (which turned out to be A Girl Called Al by Constance C. Greene, which is a story for a later blog post). After reading about it over and over again, I decided it was time I actually give it a try.

It was fantastic – the story is set in Mica, Arizona, and is narrated by a teenager called Leo Borlock. On the first day of eleventh grade, a new girl shows up at the school and turns the place upside down. She calls herself Stargirl, has a pet rat named Cinnamon who rides around in her shoulder bag, and she serenades her classmates on their birthdays in the cafeteria while playing her ukulele. Leo finds himself enchanted by her and follows her home after school one day to see where she lives. He sees her leaving anonymous gifts and cards for strangers, and eventually he follows her all the way into the desert outside of town, but chickens out and walks back to town after the sun starts to set.

At first the school is fascinated with Stargirl, and her goodwill and attention to others start to rub off on Leo and his classmates. Leo says, “We were awash in tiny attentions.  Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life. For years the strangers among us had passed sullenly in the hallways; now we looked, we nodded, we smiled.” The students at Mica Area High School shower Stargirl with admiration and imitate her with feverish precision. They buy rats and ukuleles and dance in the rain, and Leo begins to fall for her. Stargirl joins the cheerleading team and is referred to as “the best athlete on the field”.

But as the year goes on, something changes in the atmosphere: suddenly Stargirl’s good deeds for strangers seem intrusive, and her insistence on cheering for everyone becomes despicable. While Leo is still intrigued by her strangeness, he finds himself struggling between sticking by her and giving in to the pressure his friends put on Stargirl to conform. He loves her the way she is, or at least he believes he does, but he tries to tell her it would all be easier if she would just be like everyone else.

It’s a powerful story of the pull between the desire to be individual and the desire to fit in, and the difficult choices you sometimes have to make. Spinelli also writes about Arizona and the desert so evocatively that the saguaros and elf owls take on a significant, omen-like presence. There’s something in the book that sort of, not quite, almost flirts with magic, and there’s something in it which makes you believe that the characters, and the town itself, have been transformed by the year of Stargirl.

Stargirl
by Jerry Spinelli
YA S757s 2000

“‘Did you see her?’
That was the first thing Kevin said to me on the first day of school, eleventh grade.”

-posted by Kayleigh, children’s desk staff

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