The heroes of the school include Wayne Pratt: a standard, good-looking guy whose biggest ambition is to look like a GQ model and who, Leo observes, is “monumentally good at doing nothing”. Mica High is a bland school in a milquetoast town in Arizona. Leo and Stargirl meet when she begins attending Mica High after nine grades of home schooling. That’s Leo: an ordinary sixteen-year-old who prefers not to stand out in a crowd-a nice guy, shy and a bit timid. Though the book is named after the most captivating character-a non-conforming tenth grader who wears costumes to school, serenades her classmates on the ukulele, and carries her pet rat in her backpack-Stargirl is not the protagonist of the book. Moving through the story, we can identify the main plots points: status quo, inciting incident, rising action, the dark moment, resurgence, and climax. Let’s take a closer look at how that narrative shape unfolds before examining what makes the story so compelling. But despite having an uncomplicated shape, this story has an enduring, glittering quality that continues to charm readers (and now, viewers).

The arc perfectly follows the standard Aristotelian structure you could easily pin every plot point on that familiar inverted check-mark shape. The interesting thing about both the book and the movie is that the story is rather simplistic, even a bit predictable.

It can be uncommon for a movie to truly rise to the occasion of an outstanding book, but in my opinion, Stargirl the movie shines as bright as the novel. The title character, Stargirl, is one of my all-time favourite fictional characters.ĭisney recently released a film adaptation of the novel and the book, too, is having a resurgence. I first read it then and have returned to it several times over the years. When it came out in 2000, it was a New York Times bestseller and won several awards. Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli, is a classic YA novel.

This blog series is meant to demonstrate the universality of story structure with plot breakdowns of award-winning and classic novels and short fiction. Story structure relates to the psychological appeal of narrative, that which engages readers and builds in them a sense of anticipation-a desire to know what happens next.

Love stargirl summary