The Jabberwock

When I first went to purchase my issue of Jerry Spinelli’s coveted and movie adapted “Star Girl” I carefully popped the bright blue book out of the “young adult fiction” section and as an avid  young adult fiction reader, I believe that I knew about what I was digging into. By the sounds of it, there would be a boy, maybe boring, maybe sad, that would be challenged by an effulgent, honey blonde girl and her cannonade of quirkiness. This isn’t the least accurate depiction of “Star Girl” but it’s nowhere near the most accurate.

Jerry Spinelli’s “Stargirl” is a story of a girl, who might as well be from another planet, challenging the minds of the people living in a dystopian society disguised as Arizona.

To make such a strong claim that a book is completely lying about its genre, I should first explain the contents of both the dystopian genre and the young adult genre. For the purposes of this text, dystopia is defined as  “relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.” We see these states clearly in stories like Star Wars, 1984 or The Hunger Games series. In these pieces of media, we see problems that are clearly evident in our society and groups of pavid people bowing down to the likes of a ruler/rulers enforcing the guidelines of their civilization. 

For a text like 1984, we see one of the most infamous enforcers in literature, Big Brother. In Stargirl the enforcer isn’t quite as great or even noteworthy. She is a teen girl named “Hilary Kimiable” that is only in the book to hate anything outside of her norm. Which, to most male authors who haven’t been in middle school in upwards of 15 years, is soo teenage girl. The thing that makes Stargirl an unrealistic depiction of a middle school bully is the lengths Kimiable is known to go to. Those “lengths” being pet murdering.

 In chapter 8 of Stargirl we almost get a moment of realization, which is another dystopian staple, from the rule following the protagonist when Hilary threatens to drop Stargirl’s rat off of the stairs.  And yes, bullies are awful and bullying is a common theme in young adult novels, but we see Kimblie has more of an ineffable way of terrorizing those who don’t follow the rules of this world. Next we will take a peek at the setting of Stargirl, which is the most  uniform school ever to not have an actual uniform. 

I won’t pretend that individualism isn’t commented on through the whole book many times, and the theme of struggling to be yourself isn’t exclusive to a genre, as it is commented on in stories like “Perks of Being a Wallflower” by Stephan Chbosky and “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury. What stops “Stargirl” time and time again from fairly fitting into those young adult shelves is the lengths the characters will go to keep everyone in their school the same. My all time favorite example is the time our courageous Stargirl was doing her job as a cheerleader, just a bit differently, a bit more passionately than others, and then an audience member hit her with a tomato. I would like to clarify that this wasn’t a shock to the bystanders watching a girl being hit in the face by a tomato for being different. Instead everyone looked around, wishing they were the ones that did it first. This is very reminiscent of the behaviors of the Cop Car in Ray Bradbury’s short dystopian story “The Pedestrian”, where the main character is punished for being true to themselves; in that case the main character is sent to a mental institution. In the case of “Stargirl”, the humiliation and small acts of actual violence are used to keep Stargirl in check. 

After I had finished “Stargirl”, I didn’t care to watch the movie or pick up the second novel. Not because the book was some awful massacre of my favorite genre, just because I wasn’t interested how many times Spinelli could lie as if this was a normal middle school.