Stargirl is one of those books that's just always been there. It's always been in the library, and it's always been in all the YA sections of stores. Jerry Spinelli is a big deal, and Stargirl has always been a big deal. That's probably why I bought it at some point, and it has been sitting on my shelf ever since.
When I started diving into it, I honestly had no idea why it was such a staple of YA sections of stores. It's a little weird, to be just brutally honest. I put it aside and read a page or two at a time over the next couple weeks, and worked on some other projects instead. I saw it yesterday though, just sitting on my nightstand, and I decided I needed to power through and finish it so I could just be done with it and move on to the next book. I ended up finishing it that same night, and truthfully...it gets a lot better. I'm still not sure I'm as in love with it as your typical Barnes & Noble would suggest I should be, but I'm definitely glad I read it.
Leo is a high school student in Arizona where everyone is exactly the same. The same clothes, the same hair, the same level of apathy. (It's not some weird dystopian novel where they're literally robots or anything, it's just an exaggerated conversation about how all high schoolers think they need to be the same...just in case I made that unclear.) But then a new student shows up and is the complete and total opposite of everything that Leo's classmates have always been. She dresses in ridiculous hand made costumes. She has a pet rat that she carries around in her purse all the time. She carries a ukelele with her, too, and sings to people in the cafeteria on their birthdays. She's loud and doesn't have a care in the world about anything that might be considered "normal." I don't want to spoil the plot, so I'll just say that a lot happens - both positive and negative - all because of this girl who has named herself Stargirl. Leo has kind of a front seat to everything, and develops a unique relationship with her throughout the book.
I said that at first I didn't like the book. That's mostly because Stargirl is a complete whack-a-do. She is so over the top with her counter-cultural antics and wardrobe that it made me a little uncomfortable to read. And that's not because I identified with the popular kids in this story; I was not the most normal of high school kids. She's just too much, similar to how her classmates' reactions were too much. Too cruel, too mean. At first that was really annoying to me because I wanted a genuine and authentic look at popularity and what being "cool" requires of high school kids and I didn't feel like this was it. But after finishing it, and seeing how it all tied up in the end...I think I've changed my mind. I think Spinelli did it on purpose, making everything the exaggerated version of what's real. With it all said and done, I still had issues with the believability of some of it (how could an entire school population go from completely hating a girl to completely idolizing a girl to completely hating her again...all within the same calendar year and all with total unity?), I also felt a bond with the characters as I closed the last page. I felt like I got them a little bit more than I had throughout the rest of the book. Stargirl wasn't quite as whack-a-do, Leo wasn't quite as clueless, and the rest of the student body wasn't quite as heartless. It's (very) possible that my change of opinion about all of these characters was influenced by the fact that I was coming off of a week-long binge of Freaks and Geeks on Netflix at the time...but regardless, I think I get it. Different is frowned upon in high school. Different is frowned upon in all of life. And even though Stargirl seems to look at this issue at its extreme, it brings up some great points along the way. There's a sequel, and I plan on looking it up sometime.
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