I can't believe it took me this long to read Stargirl. I really liked it in that it made me THINK about the fine line between performing kooky behavior and being genuinely motivated to do something bizarre. Stargirl is this extraordinarily unusual girl, who alternately captivates and repels the students of a staid Arizona high school by playing the ukelele, cheering for the other team, and wearing bizarre outfits. She falls in love with Leo, the narrator, but he ultimately can't abide being a social outcast, and breaks up with her. In an interview at the back of the paperback, Spinelli says Stargirl is meant to illustrate how we would be if we weren't bound by social convention -- she is who we are, inside. But I found the book more complicated than that -- because she cared passionately for other people and YET interrupted their business drawing attention to herself (by dancing across the field at a football game, for example). Or she'd play ukelele and sing to them on their birthdays, without caring how embarassed they were. Or attend funerals of people she didn't know, because she felt moved reading about the death in the paper; but then, not understanding why they'd be hurt to have a stranger at the ceremony.

So she's empathy, but she's also very often more interested in her own entertainment or her own feelings than in those of others; and she's certainly performing her unusualness, in the way teenagers so often do, even if the performance is also genuine.

The book does fall in to the kooky-girl-liberates-ordinary-man genre, which does kind of rub me the wrong way. Movies like Along Came Polly; Something Wild; Annie Hall; Addicted to Love. I always wonder, as I did in Stargirl, why the girl picks this ordinary boy. And winsomeness can wear thin, after a while.

But: it really is extremely thought-provoking and different in many ways from the usual young adult romances -- though a romance it is. Check it out.

--E