Skip to main content

Stargirl Review

     I chose this book, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli, for my pleasure reading because I saw a movie trailer for this novel. It was released last year, and I came upon it because it starred one of my favorites artists, which is Grace Vanderwaal. Also, I thought that it fit my preferences. The assignment that was given last semester about our own preferences, helped me understand what I really like to read. Before, I never really thought about what I like to read so this was the first time actually picking a novel from my preferences. From the movie trailer, I could predict that the book would be about identity and being different from other people. I was really excited to read it.

    Leo Brolock is the protagonist of this novel. One day, a girl calling herself Stargirl shows up in Mica High. She was different, she wore "different" clothes, like colorful dresses, she has a pet rat, and she always holds a ukulele on her back. She sang in the cafeteria in front of everyone when someone's birthday came up and did not care about what other thought. At first, everyone was didn't know how to react and just stared and ignored her. But when Stargirl applied for the cheerleading club and sang with her ukelele in the football game, everyone suddenly started to like her. Leo Brolock fell in love with Stargirl immediately. However, there were some people who did not approve of her. As time passed, Stargirl's popularity decreases and Leo starts getting uncomfortable dating her, since he gets tormented by his peers. He tells Stargirl to be "normal", what will she do. 

    I found this book very fascinating. I liked how it is not written from the point of view of Stargirl, and wrote in the view of a member of "everyone". This way, Stargirl's existence is more emphasized and her thoughts are more of a mystery. I liked how the book ended with her leaving the town without telling anyone and leaving the present of changing everyone's view on identity and being a "good" person. Since I read this for pleasure I wasn't caught up on finding any symbolism or anything else. I made my reading more relaxed and simple. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

9/30 Reflection

Today Mr. Paterson introduces us to a tool that shows us if our choices of color are color-blind friendly. I never thought of the color choices that deeply. I knew that some combinations of colors are hard to see but just for normal people. When we checked our site, there wasn’t that much to fix but I learned that there are choices that normal people can’t notice.  Today the class was supposed to start the presentations but we were given more time. I hope that we can do a better presentation than the last one. 
Post a Comment
Read more

2021/1/14

    Today, Mr. Paterson told us about an article about paper textbooks and digital textbooks that sparked debate.       When he showed us the news article, I recognized the professor immediately and I was surprised to hear this from him. I've read a few of his books about the Japanese language (since he studies Japanese) and seen him on TV multiple times, and I liked him. I'm all in with digitalizing textbooks since it's much more efficient and most of all it's so much lighter.       Mr. Paterson told us about vertical and horizontal reading. With digital textbooks, students can do horizontal reading. When I read books I note down the words I didn't understand and search them up later. But when I forget which page I got it from, I can't consider the context clues making it harder to understand the word. I like paper books but I find this really inconvenient.            I couldn't really get why he disli...
Post a Comment
Read more

2021/10/12

    Today in class, we were introduced to the world-systems theory. This theory was developed by Immanuel Wallerstein. Mr. Paterson showed us a graph with Kondratiev waves, when the graph goes up the monopoly of the technology and when it goes down the monopoly ends. This suggests that the world is divided into 3 countries, ①core countries, ②semi-periphery countries, and ③periphery countries. It argues that technology gets passed down through generations; rich countries get to use the new high-tech stuff first and when they are done with it, the poorer countries get to use it, when it's not high-tech anymore. The richer countries don't like it when other countries infringe on their monopoly and they try to come into the "core countries". They don't like sharing so it's very rare for semi-periphery countries to bump up to the core countries. One example was when the US was developing rapidly and becoming a bigger country, Britain, France, and Spain fought in th...
Post a Comment
Read more