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Product Description
Stargirl. From the day she arrives at
quiet Mica High in a burst of color and sound, the hallways hum with
the murmur of “Stargirl, Stargirl.” She captures Leo Borlock’s heart
with just one smile. She sparks a school-spirit revolution with just
one cheer. The students of Mica High are enchanted. At first.
Then
they turn on her. Stargirl is suddenly shunned for everything that
makes her different, and Leo, panicked and desperate with love, urges
her to become the very thing that can destroy her: normal. In this
celebration of nonconformity, Newbery Medalist Jerry Spinelli weaves a
tense, emotional tale about the perils of popularity and the thrill and
inspiration of first love.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Inside Flap
Stargirl. From the day
she arrives at quiet Mica High in a burst of color and sound, the
hallways hum with the murmur of ?Stargirl, Stargirl.? She captures Leo
Borlock?s heart with just one smile. She sparks a school-spirit
revolution with just one cheer. The students of Mica High are
enchanted. At first.
Then
they turn on her. Stargirl is suddenly shunned for everything that
makes her different, and Leo, panicked and desperate with love, urges
her to become the very thing that can destroy her: normal. In this
celebration of nonconformity, Newbery Medalist Jerry Spinelli weaves a
tense, emotional tale about the perils of popularity and the thrill and
inspiration of first love.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Back Cover
“A magical and heartbreaking tale.”—Kirkus Reviews, Starred
An ALA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults
A Publishers Weekly Choice of the Year’s Best Books
About the Author
Growing up, Jerry Spinelli
was really serious about baseball. He played for the Green Sox Little
League team in his hometown of Norristown, Pennsylvania, and dreamed of
one day playing for the major leagues, preferably as shortstop for the
New York Yankees.
One
night during high school, Spinelli watched the football team win an
exciting game against one of the best teams in the country. While
everyone else rode about town tooting horns in celebration, Spinelli
went home and wrote “Goal to Go,” a poem about the game’s defining
moment, a goal-line stand. His father submitted the poem to the Norristown Times–Herald
and it was featured in the middle of the sports page a few days later.
He then traded in his baseball bat for a pencil, because he knew that
he wanted to become a writer.
After graduating from Gettysburg
College with an English degree, Spinelli worked full time as a magazine
editor. Every day on his lunch hour, he would close his office door and
craft novels on yellow magazine copy paper. He wrote four adult novels
in 12 years of lunchtime writing, but none of these were accepted for
publication. When he submitted a fifth novel about a 13-year-old boy,
adult publishers once again rejected his work, but children’s
publishers embraced it. Spinelli feels that he accidentally became an
author of children’s books.
Spinelli’s hilarious books
entertain both children and young adults. Readers see his life in his
autobiography Knots in My Yo-Yo String, as well as in his fiction.
Crash came out of his desire to include the beloved Penn Relays of his
home
state of Pennsylvania in a book, while Maniac Magee is set in a fictional town based on his
own hometown.
When
asked if he does research for his writing, Spinelli says: “The answer
is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the
library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first 15 years
of my life turned out to be one big research project. I thought I was
simply growing up in Norristown, Pennsylvania; looking back now I can
see that I was also gathering material that would one day find its way
into my books.”
On inspiration, the author says: “Ideas come
from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings.
And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming
whitewalls down a hill called Monkey.”
Spinelli lives with his
wife and fellow writer, Eileen, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. While
they write in separate rooms of the house, the couple edits and
celebrates one another’s work. Their six children have given Jerry
Spinelli a plethora of clever material for his writing.
Jerry
Spinelli is the author of more than a dozen books for young readers,
including Maniac Magee, winner of the Newbery Medal. His latest novel,
Stargirl, was a New York Times bestseller and an ALA Top Ten Best Book
for Young Adults.
From AudioFile
Stargirl is aptly named. Not exactly from a different planet, she
appears to be from a distant constellation. Selfless, meditative, and
self-assured, she just drops from above, it seems, into Mica High
School. John Ritter, as 16-year-old Leo Borlock, passes from
fascination at this mysterious sprite, to love, anger, pain,
humiliation, and finally back to a kind of love again, but only after
it's too late. Ritter's reading pulsates with all the guarded passion
and quiet graces of a young man in love for the first time. It is
charged with Leo's energy, at other times wracked with his confusion.
Always, though, it reverberates with the social upheaval that gentle
Stargirl Caraway's free spirit sparks in the poisonously conservative
atmosphere of Mica High. Leo never quite recovers after they collide,
but both he and the listener are changed. Newbery medalist Spinelli
once again reminds us how difficult but wonderful it is to be human.
P.E.F. 2002 YALSA Selection © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Publishers Weekly
Part fairy godmother, part outcast,
part dream-come-true, the star of Spinelli's novel shares many of the
mythical qualities as the protagonist of his Maniac Magee. Spinelli
poses searching questions about loyalty to one's friends and oneself
and leaves readers to form their own answers, said PW in our Best Books
citation. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Grade 6-10-High
school is a time of great conformity, when being just like everybody
else is of paramount importance. So it is no surprise that Stargirl
Caraway causes such excitement and confusion when she arrives at Mica
High in Arizona. Initially, everyone is charmed by her unconventional
behavior- she wears unusual clothing, she serenades the lunchroom with
her ukulele, she practices random acts of kindness, she is cheerleader
extraordinaire in a place with no school spirit. Naturally, this cannot
last and eventually her individuality is reviled. The story is told by
Leo, who falls in love with Stargirl's zany originality, but who then
finds himself unable to let go of the need to be conventional.
Spinelli's use of a narrator allows readers the distance necessary to
appreciate Stargirl's eccentricity and Leo's need to belong to the
group, without removing them from the immediacy of the story. That
makes the ending all the more disappointing-to discover that Leo is
looking back imposes an unnecessary adult perspective on what happened
in high school. The prose lapses into occasionally unfortunate flowery
flights, but this will not bother those readers-girls especially-who
will understand how it feels to not quite fit the mold and who attempt
to exult in their differences.
Sharon Grover, Arlington County Department of Libraries, VA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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