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Summary
Summary
"LOVE, STARGIRL "picks up a year after "Stargirl "ends and reveals the new life of the beloved character who moved away so suddenly at the end of "Stargirl." The novel takes the form of "the world's longest letter," in diary form, going from date to date through a little more than a year's time. In her writing, Stargirl mixes memories of her bittersweet time in Mica, Arizona, with involvements with new people in her life. In "Love, Stargirl," we hear the voice of Stargirl herself as she reflects on time, life, Leo, and - of course - love.
Author Notes
Jerry Spinelli was born in Norristown, Pennsylvania on February 1, 1941. He received a bachelor's degree from Gettysburg College and a master's degree from Johns Hopkins University. He worked as an editor with Chilton from 1966 to 1989. He launched his career in children's literature with Space Station 7th Grade in 1982. He has written over 30 books including The Bathwater Gang, Picklemania, Stargirl, Milkweed, and Mama Seeton's Whistle. In 1991, he won the Newbery Award for Maniac Magee. In 1998, Wringer was named a Newbery Honor book.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Newbery Medalist Spinelli's sequel to his 2000 novel Stargirl, readers join the eponymous heroine and find out how she is coping after being dumped by Leo Borlock. Having moved from Arizona to Pennsylvania, Stargirl records her thoughts, observations and emotions in near daily (unsent) missives to Leo, as she works to move beyond her sadness. Her entries are peppered with poetry as well as little pep talks she writes to herself whenever her spirits are low. ("You have your whole life ahead of you, and all you're doing is looking back. Grow up, girl. There are some things they don't teach you in homeschool.") Stargirl spends most of her time with a talkative six-year-old, Dootsie, a grumpy girl named Alvina, and a handful of older locals with their own quirks and problems. She also meets a boy with a mysterious past; their brief romance and other events combine to lift Stargirl out of her doldrums, as she reconciles her feelings about Leo ("You be you and I'll be me, today and today and today, and let's trust the future to tomorrow"). Readers should embrace Stargirl's originality and bigheartedness, and may be inspired to document their own emotional ups and downs in the Stargirl Journal, available the same month, which consists of blank lined pages with quotations from both novels. Ages 12-up. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Intermediate, Middle School) Stargirl -- the very personification of unconventionality and outsiderhood, the eccentric homeschooled teenager who temporarily reconfigured the entire social structure of staid Mica High in Stargirl (rev. 7/00) -- is back. In this sequel, she has just moved from Arizona to Pennsylvania, and is writing an extended letter to her one-time boyfriend (and Stargirl narrator) Leo detailing her year of adjustment. Spinelli originally presented Stargirl as a symbol of nonconformity, an extraordinary force demanding a reaction from her more-ordinary fellow students; making her into a wholly flesh-and-blood character is a tricky proposition, and Spinelli doesn't quite pull it off. He surrounds the lovesick Stargirl, still an over-the-top personality in her own right, with a host of offbeat characters: a precocious five-year-old named Dootsie with an overly cute vocabulary; an agoraphobic donut-loving divorcee; an angry, insult-hurling tomboy; a widower who sits daily by his wife's grave. The preciousness combines with a relentlessly uplifting plot -- in which Stargirl, having found her place in her new community, decides to turn her face to the sun and the future -- and makes the reader long for the bracing counterweight of those ultra-conventional Mica High cheerleaders. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Stargirl (Stargirl, 2000) is disappearing. She and her family (including pet rat Cinnamon) have moved to Pennsylvania, leaving her boyfriend, Leo, behind in Arizona. Can you lose your favorite person without losing yourself? she writes in one of the many letters to him that comprise an epistolary companion to Spinelli's first story of the eccentric, large-hearted, happy-to-a-fault teenager. The questions abound: Will she be reunited with her Starboy, or will he be replaced by Perry, the petty-thieving, dangerously attractive new boy in her life? How will she help her new friends (five-year-old motormouth Dootsie, angry Alvina, agoraphobic Betty Lou, grieving widower Charlie, developmentally disabled Arnold)? And are the many genuinely nice moments in this novel buried under too much sentimentality, whimsicality, and self-conscious cuteness? The answer lies with individual readers. The many teens who loved the first book will embrace this sequel. Those who didn't, won't. It's as simple as that.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2007 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 6-10--In Jerry Spinelli's sequel (Knopf, 2007) to Stargirl (Knopf, 2000), Stargirl and her family have moved from Arizona and are living in Pennsylvania. Listeners join Stargirl a year after she was dumped by her boyfriend, Leo. Stargirl shares her life through her self-proclaimed "world's longest letter" to Leo, introducing several eccentric people: Dootsie, a precocious six-year-old girl; Betty Lou, an agoraphobic divorcee; Alvina, a lively 11-year-old girl with an occasional temper; and the mysterious Perry, a boy who often evokes unsettling emotions in Stargirl. With experiences that bring alternating happiness and sadness, Stargirl begins to find acceptance. On occasion, parts of the letter drag a bit. Mandy Siegfried gives each character a unique voice, and her perfectly pitched and well-timed narration brings listeners into Stargirl's world. While a familiarity with the first novel would be helpful, this sequel does stand on its own.--Stephanie A. Squicciarini, Fairport Public Library, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Fifteen-year-old Susan "Stargirl" Caraway has moved to Pennsylvania, but as independent and free-spirited as she is, she can't seem to let go of Arizona and her old boyfriend Leo Borlock. She's lonely, even in the midst of a loving family and a colorful cast of characters in her new town. There's five-year-old spitfire Dootsie, agoraphobic Betty Lou, angry Alvina, Margie the donut queen and mysterious Perry, a potential new boy in Stargirl's life. As much as readers will relish this community and wish Stargirl would get on with her life there and forget mooning over Leo, she can't seem to, and the whole leisurely paced novel is "the world's longest letter" to him. Humor, graceful writing, lively characters and important lessons about life will make this a hit with fans of Stargirl (2000) and anyone who likes a quiet, reflective novel. Those meeting Stargirl here for the first time will want to read the previous work to see if Leo is worthy of her devotion. (Fiction. 11-14) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
January 1 Dear Leo, I love beginnings. If I were in charge of calendars, every day would be January 1. And what better way to celebrate this New Year's Day than to begin writing a letter to my once (and future?) boyfriend. I found something today. Something special. The thing is, it's been right in front of me ever since we moved here last year, but today is the first time I really saw it. It's a field. A plain old vacant field. No house in view except a little white stucco bungalow off to the right. It's a mile out of town, a one-minute bike ride from my house. It's on a hill--the flat top of a hill shaped like an upside-down frying pan. It used to be a pick-your-own-strawberries patch, but now it grows only weeds and rocks. The field is on the other side of Route 113, which is where my street (Rapps Dam Road) dead-ends. I've biked past this field a hundred times, but for some reason today I stopped. I looked at it. I parked my bike and walked into it. The winter weeds were scraggly and matted down, like my hair in the morning. The frozen ground was cloddy and rock-hard. The sky was gray. I walked to the center and just stood there. And stood. How can I explain it? Alone, on the top of that hill, in the middle of that "empty" field (Ha!--write this down, Leo: nothing is empty), I felt as if the universe radiated from me, as if I were standing on the X that marked the center of the cosmos. Until then I had done my daily meditation in many different places in and around town, but never here. Now I did. I sat down. I barely noticed the cold ground. I held my hands on my thighs, palms up to the world. I closed my eyes and dissolved out of myself. I now call it washing my mind. The next thing I noticed was a golden tinge beyond my eyelids. I opened my eyes. The sun was seeping through the clouds. It was setting over the treetops in the west. I closed my eyes again and let the gold wash over me. Night was coming on when I got up. As I headed for my bike, I knew I had found an enchanted place. January 3 Oh, Leo, I'm sad. I'm crying. I used to cry a lot when I was little. If I stepped on a bug I'd burst into tears. Funny thing--I was so busy crying for everything else, I never cried for myself. Now I cry for me. For you. For us. And now I'm smiling through my tears. Remember the first time I saw you? In the lunchroom? I was walking toward your table. Your eyes--that's what almost stopped me in my tracks. They boggled. I think it wasn't just the sight of me--long frontier dress, ukulele sticking out of my sunflower shoulder sack--it was something else too. It was terror. You knew what was coming. You knew I was going to sing to someone, and you were terrified it might be you. You quick looked away, and I breezed on by and didn't stop until I found Alan Ferko and sang "Happy Birthday" to him. But I felt your eyes on me the whole time, Leo. Oh yes! Every second. And with every note I sang to Alan Ferko I thought: Someday I'm going to sing to that boy with the terrified eyes. I never did sing to you, Leo, not really. You, of all people. It's my biggest regret. . . . Now, see, I'm sad again. January 10 As I said last week, I wash my mind all over the place. Since the idea--and ideal--is to erase myself from wherever and whenever I am, I think I should not allow myself to become too attached to any one location, not even Enchanted Hill, as I call it now, or to any particular time of day or night. So that's why this morning I was riding my bike in search of a new place to meditate. Cinnamon was hitching a ride in my pocket. As I rode past a cemetery a splash of brightness caught my eye. It was a man sitting in a chair in front of a gravestone. At least I think it was a man, he was so bundled up against the cold. The bright splash was the red and yellow plaid scarf he wore around his neck. He seemed to be talking. Before long I found myself back near my house, in a park called Bemus. I climbed onto a picnic table and got into my meditation position. (OK, back up . . . I'm homeschooling again. Gee, I wonder why--my Mica High School experience went so well! Ha ha. So I have to meet all the state requirements, right?--math, English, etc. Which I do. But I don't stop there. I have other courses too. Unofficial ones. Like Principles of Swooning. Life Under Rocks. Beginner's Whistling. Elves. We call it our shadow curriculum. ((Don't tell the State of--oops, almost told you what state I'm living in.)) My favorite shadow subject is Elements of Nothingness. That's where the mind wash comes in. Totally wiping myself out. Erasing myself. (((Remember the lesson I gave you in the desert?))) Which, when you think about it, is really not nothing. I mean, when I'm really doing it right, getting myself totally erased, I'm the opposite of nothing--I'm everything. I'm everything but myself. I've evaporated like water vapor into the universe. I am no longer Stargirl. I am tree. Wind. Earth.) OK, sorry for the detour (and parenthetical overkill). . . . So there I was, sitting cross-legged on the picnic table, eyes closed, washing my mind (and getting school credit for it!), and suddenly I felt something on my eyelid. Probably a bug, I thought, and promptly washed away the thought, and the something on my eyelid just became part of everything else. But then the something moved. It traced across my eyelid and went down my nose and around the outline of my lips. Excerpted from Love, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.