FernFolio

On January 1st, Stargirl begins a letter to Leo, the boy she loved – loves. Recently moved to Pennsylvania from Arizona where, after being home schooled from kindergarten, she briefly attended high school (an experiment that didn’t work out so well), sixteen year-old Stargirl tells Leo about her new home, about the poetry field trips her mother assigns that take around her community, and about the new friends she is making.
Though she has a new best friend, five year-old Dootsie, who drags her out of herself and, by blithely giving away all of her most precious mementoes, helps her to find herself again, and a new confidant in the agoraphobic Betty Lou whose warmth and playfulness are interrupted by days of unbearable sadness, Stargirl is not happy. She misses Leo, misses his physical presence, treasures the memories of their conversations, their trips into the desert, and their kiss. She remembers, with gratitude, how he stood up for her in the face of the condemnation of their peers, but also remembers that he tried, with her willing co-operation, to make her over into someone more conventional, more Susan than Stargirl, before he walked away.
In her letter to Leo, a letter that she writes over the course of a year, Stargirl records stories of her growing relationships with Dootsie and Betty Lou, and of the other strange and wonderful people whom she observes and meets. There is Alvina, the combative eleven year-old who has fights with boys and calls herself a rotten kid, and Charlie, who sits on a folding chair everyday next to his wife Grace’s grave, unable to bear the notion of being parted from her, and Arnold, the mentally disabled boy-man who walks all over town and asks, “Are you looking for me?”.
There is also Perry, the boy whom Stargirl observes shoplifting, whose forthright questions and comments border on rudeness, and who, Alvina, whispers, spent a year in boot camp because of his stealing. Stargirl berates Perry for his littering, but climbs onto his roof on hot summer night to talk to him, having learned that he likes to sleep under the stars. Though she is often repelled by his behaviour and refuses to join his harem of girlfriends, who call themselves the Honeybees, Stargirl is drawn to Perry who occasionally says things that suggest he might understand her better than she does herself.
Through her letter, Stargirl shares with Leo her explorations about time, from the marking of anniversaries of her relationship with him, and her fear that she has become caught up in reliving the past and dreading the uncertainty of the future, rather than living in the moment, to her decision to destroy all the clocks in the house, and her six month-long project to build a solar calendar in a nearby farmer’s field using white plastic spatulas, culminating in a pre-dawn party on the morning of the Winter Solstice, to which she invites all of the friends she has made since beginning her letter. As the year-long letter draws to a close, Stargirl realizes that nothing and everything has changed since the previous January, and that, despite her previous thoughts to the contrary, she will send it to Leo.
Love, Stargirl is a tender, honest and remarkable sequel to the extraordinary Stargirl.
FernFolio Editor