My nephew is going into seventh grade, and this was part of his required summer reading. He didn't have much to say about it, not surprising since it's hardly a title, nor a story, I would expect to appeal to most middle school boys. Or girls, for that matter. At that age, I would have picked up the book, assuming it was a science fiction story, then put it down in disgust when I discovered what it really was.
I'm not sure who the target audience is for this book, since the setting is high school and the themes adolescent, yet the intellectual level seems more geared towards elementary school.
Nonetheless, when I picked up the book recently to check it out, I became intrigued when I discovered that the title character was homeschooled before making her way into public high school—and definitely not fitting in. So when my nephew left for home, taking the book with him, I borrowed it from the library so I could finish reading the story.I also picked up a few more, similar, books (some by the same author, some not) for comparison. Back when our children were home, I read hundreds of children's books from the library, and was generally dismayed by the genre of modern adolescent school-based stories. Things haven't changed much. As the genre goes, this is among the better, so I almost hesitate to say I found it oftentimes insipid and vulgar. Compared to most of what is out there, Stargirl has much to recommend it.
Back to the homeschooling idea. I don't know if the author actually knows something about homeschooling and is distorting the idea to make his point, or if he is just using the idea as a device to explain why Stargirl is so different. How else to explain someone who is immune to peer pressure, works hard at being kind to everyone, and is unafraid to sing aloud in the school cafeteria? Certainly he gets one thing right: homeschooling allows ordinary parents to raise extraordinary children.
What I really can't understand is why Stargirl would be required reading at the middle school level, unless some teacher wanted an easy way to begin a discussion on peer pressure. For literature, we must stop feeding our students pap! We can no longer hide behind the fiction that they cannot handle more complicated reading. The Harry Potter books are longer and more complex, deal with difficult subjects, and are replete with literary allusions—and Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was on the personal summer reading list of countless children much younger than seventh grade.
In my nephew's case, he fit Stargirl in between Harry Potter and Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. Stargirl is okay. It was an interesting diversion. But something is wrong when the books a child reads for school are so much below the books he reads of his own accord. Wrong with the modern American educational system, that is—something is obviously very right with the child!
