Star Girl...a book review

Star Girl by Jerry Spinelli

I want to be Stargirl. Or Pocket Mouse. Or whatever it is she calls herself these days. Stargirl is the optimist's answer to Holden Caulfield. He wanted to be a catcher in the rye. She wanted to drive a truck. When I was young, I wanted to be a walking mail carrier. As you can see, we are totally kindred spirits.

We all wanted to allow creativity to rule our lives. We all wanted jobs that we could sort of tolerate and almost like. I liked the idea of hiking through the mountains, delivering people's hand-written love letters to one another; Stargirl liked the idea of steering her truck, delivering goods to the people who most deserved them.

I did not read Star Girl when I was in middle school even though it could be classified as a young adult novel. I listened to it on audio tape in the car. It was read by the late John Ritter and I listened to it while visiting my sister. Whenever we would get in the car, we would turn on Star Girl. It captivated both of us. We laughed at it together. We sighed in unison. As an adult, I had never read a novel with another person at the exact same time. Remember how in elementary school the teacher would begin a chapter book and every day you would look forward to sitting on the carpet after lunch just to listen? It was settling and comforting to have someone read to you. And, we all listened together and there was no race to finish because there was no other option than to go through the exercise of absorbing the book together. Anyway, that's how I read Star Girl. In the front seat of a car with my sister at my side. We both loved Stargirl and Leo. And John Ritter's voice kind of completed the satisfaction I felt.

Stargirl spent most of her years being home-schooled and when she enters a public high school, the kids do not know what to make of her. She often dresses as a clown and plays the ukulele, often serenading classmates in the cafeteria. She is not cool by the conventional standard because--though she most likely understands social constructs better than the pupils who actually follow such standards--she chooses to bypass them for her own way of living. For example, Stargirl becomes a cheerleader for the school. She takes this responsibility further than the field, however, when she begins to cheer for everyone at every opportunity. Go big or go home, right? Well, she does.

Stargirl is smart and proves herself academically. She also expresses herself through risky fashion just to embellish her own existence. Fashion risks? Smarts? Is that why my sister and I loved her so? Maybe. But, I think the most appealing quality was that she really made no excuses for herself. That made Leo take notice and admit to liking her. And, we the readers could also take notice and collectively appreciate this bright, individualistic girl. And, in return, we could appreciate that repressed part of ourselves that we are too afraid to let others see.

Read this book and you will understand why I am holding my breath, waiting by the mailbox for my own set of candid photographs taken by a stranger from afar when I was carelessly playing in my sandbox as a five-year-old. And, I'm waiting for my own version of a porcupine necktie. Stargirl, are you still out there?