Previous
Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Stargirl, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Individuality and Conformity
Human Nature
Seeing, Visibility, and Invisibility
Friendship, Love, and Social Pressure
Summary
Analysis
The next day at school, a girl named Hillari Kimble is sneering. Stargirl can’t be real, Hillari is telling everyone: she’s just a scam, an actress, or a “nutcase” sent by the administration to stir up school spirit. Leo quietly mocks this idea, but Kevin hopes it’s true—after all, they could unmask the hoax on Hot Seat. Leo is surprised that Kevin seems to want Stargirl to be a fake.
Someone as unusual as Stargirl doesn’t fit into anyone’s ready-made categories, so some conclude that she simply can’t be what she appears. Meanwhile, there’s a distinction between Leo and Kevin: Leo is open to the idea that Stargirl is for real, even hoping for that, while Kevin cynically thinks of how exposing Stargirl as a fake could benefit him.
Themes
The more Leo sees Stargirl, the more he wonders whether she’s for real. On the second day of school, she wears overalls, pigtails, and fake freckles, looking like Heidi or Bo Peep. At lunch, she wanders among the tables and boldly looks people in the face, making Leo uneasy. At last she stops in front of a chubby senior named Alan Ferko, singing “Happy Birthday” while strumming the ukulele. Alan looks embarrassed. As Stargirl leaves the cafeteria, Leo sees Hillari pointing at her and saying something he can’t hear.
Stargirl makes a concerted effort to see people, and not only that, to communicate to them that they are seen—something that’s so unusual as to embarrass onlookers, as well as the object of Stargirl’s well-intentioned song. It’s a disruption of a high school culture in which who is or isn’t seen determines social order.
Themes
Kevin tells Leo that Stargirl had better be fake—if not, how long is she going to last at Mica High? Leo wonders the same. Mica High is “not exactly a hotbed of nonconformity.” If people distinguish themselves in any way, they “quickly [snap] back into place, like rubber bands.” If Stargirl is real, she can’t survive for long in an environment like this.
Stargirl keeps showing up at school in unusual outfits: a 1920s flapper dress, a kimono, a line of ladybug and butterfly pins crawling up her stockings. She frequently serenades classmates with “Happy Birthday” in the lunchroom. She even greets strangers in the hallways—something a lowly 10th grader doesn’t normally do. Stargirl carries her pet rat to school every day. She dances in the rain during gym class. Leo finds Stargirl impossible to summarize and observes that “her ways knocked us off balance.”
Stargirl remains oblivious to what’s expected of her at Mica High as a conventional high school girl and as a sophomore. Her obliviousness, as much as her specific quirky behaviors, unsettles onlookers, who don’t know how to classify her within the school’s social structure, and perhaps question their own position as a result.
Themes
Get the entire Stargirl LitChart as a printable PDF.
Yet Leo can’t get Stargirl off his mind. At night, he likes to let the moonlight stream into his bedroom—it gives him “a sense of the otherness of things.” On one of these nights, Leo decides that Hillari Kimble is wrong: Stargirl is for real.
