70 pages • 2 hours read
Jerry SpinelliStargirl
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Prologue-Chapter 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary: “Porcupine Necktie”
First-person narrator Leo Borlock recalls how, as a child, he loves his Uncle Pete’s special tie which features a porcupine. When Leo is 12, his family moves from Pennsylvania to the small town of Mica, Arizona. Uncle Pete gives Leo the porcupine necktie as a going away present. Leo determines to start his own collection of porcupine ties, but two years later, he still only has the one from his uncle. Leo’s mother mentions his aspirations to collect porcupine ties in a birthday section of the local town newspaper. A few days later, Leo receives a mysterious birthday present from an unknown sender: a porcupine necktie.
Chapter 1 Summary
On the first day of their junior year at Mica Area High School (MAHS), Leo and his friend Kevin Quinlan hear rumors about a new student named Stargirl. They finally see her at lunchtime. Stargirl is wildly different from the other kids at school. She wears a long, ruffled dress and carries a ukulele strapped to her back. They learn that Stargirl is in tenth grade and was previously homeschooled. In the cafeteria, she takes her ukulele and begins to sing and dance among the tables while the other students stare in silent amazement. Kevin and Leo immediately know they want to interview Stargirl on their school television show, Hot Seat.
Chapter 2 Summary
Stargirl continues to astonish the school population. She alternates her long dresses with outlandish costumes, asks weird questions in class, brings her pet rat to school, and plays and sings “Happy Birthday” to everyone on their birthdays. Hillari Kimble, a snarky but vocal presence in the student body, insists that Stargirl is a “scam” (7), an actress planted by the school administration to boost morale. Many kids believe this rumor. Kevin hopes that Stargirl is a plant for two reasons: one, so he can expose her on their tv show, and two, for her own sake because MAHS is big on conformity. Leo observes Stargirl closely. As he thinks of her at night when the moon shines in his room, Leo realizes she is real.
Chapter 3 Summary
Leo no longer wants to feature Stargirl on Hot Seat. His gut feeling is to “leave her alone” (14). This new attitude angers Kevin. Usually, the two friends agree on everything. They both arrived in Mica the same year and share a lot in common, including their desire to be on television. Hillari expands her spiteful theories about Stargirl, suggesting that she is a drug user, an alien, or a homeless person. Leo, along with the other students, is puzzled by Stargirl. She makes Leo feel strange, and he avoids her when she approaches in the hallway. One day, Leo follows Stargirl after school. She puts an unsigned letter in a mailbox and then walks out of town into the desert, singing and playing her ukulele. As the sun sets, Leo realizes Stargirl knows he is tailing her. He runs back to town.
Chapter 4 Summary
Leo notes that Hillari Kimble is known at MAHS for three things: her complaining, getting accepted to the cheerleading squad and then refusing to join, and her gorgeous, silent boyfriend, Wayne Parr. Wayne, Leo observes, “seems to be a nobody” (19), but everybody in school acts like him. He does not stand out in any way: his grades are average, he does not join any teams or clubs, and he does not participate in class discussions. When Kevin interviewed Wayne for Hot Seat the previous year, Wayne said that his hero is the magazine GQ. Wayne aspires to be a male model. Leo thought then that Wayne would continue to be the standard for their school’s culture, little dreaming that Stargirl would come and challenge the norm.
Chapter 5 Summary
Kevin frantically calls Leo and tells him to hurry to the football game. Kevin is one of only a handful of students who attend the games. The team is terrible, the band is so small they stand and play instead of marching, and the cheerleaders are spiritless. On this night, Stargirl joins the halftime show. She marches and dances around the field while the band plays and then seizes the football before punting it and running out of the stadium. The crowd cheers, inspiring the cheerleaders. The next game is packed. People expectantly await Stargirl’s return, but she does not appear. The following day, the captain of the cheerleading squad convinces Stargirl to join the team. Although Stargirl practices with them and wears the cheerleading uniform on game days, she still acts like her free-spirited self. Leo and the others decide Stargirl is “entertaining” (26) but still do not fully accept her.
Chapter 6 Summary
The day before Hillari’s birthday, she warns Stargirl not to sing to her: Stargirl agrees. The next day, the atmosphere is tense as the students wait to see what Stargirl will do at lunchtime. Instead of singing to Hillari, Stargirl sings “Happy Birthday” to Leo using Hillari’s name. Hillary leaves the lunchroom in a huff. Leo is embarrassed but happy. When Kevin asks Stargirl why she sang to Leo, she replies that Leo is “cute” (29).
Chapter 7 Summary
Kevin and Leo visit their old friend Archie Brubaker to ask his opinion about Stargirl. A former paleontologist and retired university professor, Archie lives in a house that is crowded with bones and specimens, including the skull of Barney, a Paleocene-era rodent. Archie loves teaching and runs an informal “school” from his home which the boys and most of the other kids in town enjoy. Archie calls his pupils the Loyal Order of the Stone Bone.
Archie has known Stargirl for five years. Her mother would drop Stargirl off one day a week to learn from Archie. Stargirl’s mother is a costume designer for movies, and her dad works at the local company MicaTronics. Archie assures the boys that Stargirl is genuine; her unusual behavior simply represents who she is. Archie concludes that “she is us more than we are us” (32).
Prologue-Chapter 7 Analysis
In these opening chapters, Spinelli establishes several of the novel’s important themes and characters. The first-person point of view offers readers a window into Leo’s intimate thoughts and feelings. By having Leo narrate the story from a point in the future, Spinelli allows the character to examine his past from a more intellectually and emotionally mature perspective. This distance informs Leo’s tone. He adopts a tone of wistfulness and respectful awe in his poetic descriptions of Stargirl, combined with a wry sense of humor about the students at Mica High.
Leo is a transplant to Mica and quickly assimilates into the school culture. He aligns with the other students, including himself in “we” and “us” statements he makes expressing their initial wariness of Stargirl. Yet Leo is also open to independent thought. Stargirl tantalizes Leo to the point that he follows her after school. Although he fears that the school will change her, he is also frightened that Stargirl poses a threat to his own normalcy, worrying, “Was I myself becoming goofy?” (16). In another reflection of Leo’s ambivalent attitude toward Stargirl, he feels protective toward her. His unwillingness to put her on Hot Seat and his desire to warn her of the other students—and, subconsciously, of himself—foreshadow the moment when he turns away from her.
Leo’s conflicted feelings toward Stargirl highlight two major themes: the importance of being your true self and the pressure to conform to group norms. Stargirl epitomizes nonconformity. She is unlike the other students at MAHS. She does not fit in and does not follow their herd mentality. She is perceived as “weird” and “strange” (11), an “alien” in their culture (33). In these initial chapters, Stargirl is as much a puzzle to the reader as to Leo. Since we see her through Leo’s perspective, we know her only through her eccentricities. Leo senses, however, that Stargirl is “real” (33) and that her dancing, singing, and kindnesses reflect genuine free-spirited positivity. Archie calls Stargirl a “rara avis” (35), or “rare bird;” a uniquely fine individual.
In contrast, Wayne Parr, who has a handsome exterior but an uninteresting, undistinguished interior, is the apathetic “core” of the school (20). He is the cultural norm that the rest of the students accept and follow. Kevin hopes that Stargirl is “fake” for her own sake (9), suggesting that it is dangerous to go against established behaviors. Hillari wages a campaign of rumors and intimidation against Stargirl, trying to keep her alienated from other students. This stereotyping of outsiders who appear to challenge the status quo is a characteristic of groupthink: negatively enforced group behavior. Although Stargirl’s attention-getting exploits are intriguing and entertaining, other students maintain their distance. Leo notes that the students try and fail to compartmentalize Stargirl, to “define her, wrap her up as we did each other” (11). Stargirl is an outsider. When Stargirl circumvents Hillari’s birthday warning and is later accepted onto the cheerleading squad, the stage is set for a future conflict.
Several important symbols also make initial appearances here. Names are reflections of an individual’s sense of self. Archie suggest that instead of being saddled with one name all your life, you should be able to change your name. Over the years, Stargirl calls herself different names: Pocket Mouse, Mudpie, and Hullygully. As Stargirl grows emotionally, she changes her name to fit her identity. Finally, the desert setting plays a significant role in novel. The harsh desert isolates the small town of Mica, but Leo finds hidden beauty in the dry landscape. Desert flora and fauna color Leo’s figurative descriptions. The lunchroom atmosphere on Hillari’s birthday, for example, “bristled like cactus paddles” (27). Leo also compares Stargirl to splashes of color in the desert, spotlighting how she stands out from the crowd at school.
Related Titles
By Jerry Spinelli
