I’ve read a lot of real great books in my life, books that touched my heart deeply and won their way into my “best books ever written” list.  Just recently Stargirl became one of them. I was amazed by the book; it’s extremely well-written and it is so meaningful that it’s hardly possible for anyone not to like it. It tells a story of a girl who is very different from the others, even when she doesn’t mean to.  She just does whatever she wants to and she doesn’t want to blend into the crowd.  I see many people nowadays that want to be different from the others but just end up being exactly like another group of people.  Stargirl, the main character of the book, is unlike any other person in the whole town and she’s not even trying to be different. She always does strange things but all of the things she does are meant for the good of the people.  It seems like she lives her life for other people while not losing herself and becoming like them.

            The question that would rise in everybody’s mind would be:  but how would people react to someone so different?  Would they love her for her antics or hate her because she’s not one of them?  The crowd in this book does both of those things.  At first, they love her because she’s new and they’re curious about her.  Then, they start hating her because she does many things that they’re not used to.  In their book of rules, the things she does are way out of ordinary and just wrong.  In her book, those things are just normal and should be part of their nature. An example of one of those things was her cheering at the games no matter what team scored. It was because she just figured that the games were for people to have fun, not be competitive and hate each other. When they start hating her, she doesn’t even notice; she’s still nice to everybody and she still does good things for them.  She’s free; she’s not bound by the unwritten rules that the society established, she does whatever she thinks is right. 

            I would recommend this book to everybody who feels like they have to be like everybody else because they’re too afraid to be different, to let their true nature show.  This book would serve as an inspiration to them, and would show them that it’s okay to be different from everyone else once in a while.

            My favorite part of the book was when Leo, Stargirl’s boyfriend, who’s the complete opposite of her, tries to explain to Stargirl why she has to be like everyone else and why she needs to be a part of the society, in other words, to blend in. I like that part because even though every single thing Leo says makes perfect sense, in my heart I know that it’s wrong, everything he says is wrong.  But then, I wonder, why does it make so much sense even though I know for sure that he’s wrong?  Leo is the voice of the crowd; he says exactly what everyone thinks. It’s everyone’s reason for hating Stargirl. It’s the simple and established truth, the main principle. “Everyone should be the same, be a part of the group, the community.” That’s what everyone wants. That’s what they teach us from the beginning, and we don’t even try to question it. However, Stargirl did question it, mainly because she had been mostly isolated from the society. She didn’t know.  She didn’t have teachers, only her mother, who, it seems, encouraged her different ideas. There was no one to influence her.     

I don’t know if I’ll read any other books written by Jerry Spinelli, but who knows?  Two other books that he wrote are Crush, about a football player who like to bully people, and Knots in My Yo-Yo String: The Autobiography of a Kid, an ALA Best Book For Young Adults.