Her peers, in fact, interpret that refusal as a rejection of themselves. Stargirl’s refusal to fall in line with social norms (only supporting one’s own team) separates her from her peers more than her unusual clothes and lunchtime ukulele playing have done. She’s mobbed with angry, uncomprehending questions (“Why can’t you be normal?” “s something wrong with us you gotta be so different?”) during the school’s Hot Seat interview show and is subsequently shunned by the entire student body. After the state basketball tournament, when Stargirl cheers for the opposing teams and sympathizes with an injured rival, Mica High students begin to find Stargirl’s uniqueness disquieting. When Stargirl’s behaviors transgress certain social conventions, however, her individuality comes to be seen as threatening-in particular, it offends school spirit in such a way that her peers feel rejected, ostracizing her in turn. Though Stargirl at first seemed like a problem to be solved, overturning “normal” at Mica High, now her disruptive presence seems to be fixing something that had been lacking among its students. As students begin to copy Stargirl’s openness and kind gestures, they begin to discover more about themselves at the same time. We discovered the color of each other’s eyes,” observes Leo. For years the strangers among us had passed sullenly in the hallways now we looked, we nodded, we smiled. “It was wonderful to see Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life. At first, this disruption even has a positive effect on life at Mica High. The students’ inability to categorize her throws doubt on the way they categorize themselves, too.
Stargirl, however, with her obliviousness to conventional norms and comfort with her own “normal,” disrupts all this: “We wanted to define her, to wrap her up as we did each other, but we could not seem to get past ‘weird’ and ‘strange’ and ‘goofy.’ Her ways knocked us off balance.” Stargirl upsets Mica High’s carefully delineated social hierarchy in a way that’s hard for her peers to articulate. If we happened to somehow distinguish ourselves, we quickly snapped back into place, like rubber bands.” Everyone more or less conforms to one another, and each student has a habitual place that’s neatly distinguished and makes sense within the context of the whole. There were individual variants here and there, of course, but within pretty narrow limits we all wore the same clothes, talked the same way, ate the same food, listened to the same music. As narrator Leo Borlock explains, “Mica Area High School was not exactly a hotbed of nonconformity. By focusing on the reactions of Stargirl’s peers even more than Stargirl’s strangeness, Spinelli argues that conformist rejection of individualism says more about conformists than about the person being rejected, and also that individualism’s positive effects often appear long after the fact.Īt first, though Stargirl’s individuality is unsettling and disruptive to Mica High’s conformist environment, her peers mostly see it as harmless and even, eventually, as good.
But the novel’s action centers more around the reactions of her Mica High peers when the formerly homeschooled Stargirl shows up, serenading kids with her ukulele, celebrating those who are usually ignored, and-more controversially-even showing support to the school’s rivals during a state basketball tournament. Jerry Spinelli’s young adult novel Stargirl highlights the kind-hearted quirkiness of a high school girl who calls herself Stargirl.
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