Book 2/40, Stargirl

Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli

"people are afraid of people who are different. That's what prisons and mental hospitals are for."

A beautiful book about non-conformity, peer pressure, bravery and being true to yourself. This was the story of Stargirl, a unique and colourful free spirit who has great confidence in her self and her own ability to make others happy. I found myself smiling at Stargirl’s random acts of kindness. She would play the ukelele and sing Happy Birthday to everyone she knew. She would leave gifts on people’s door steps, give surprise gifts of candy to her classmates on Halloween. She would drop coins on the pavement for people to find.  Stargirl was happy(?) to be an individual, a non-conformist. 

We all have someone who changes our lives in a way that we cant even start to describe, and the author has captured this perfectly in Stargirl. 

This isn't, however, a sickly sweet story of do-gooding but a comment on how we all feel we must conform.

It made me sad, but not in the way I think I was being shown to feel.  

Some may say that I have missed the point and that I should want to be more like Stargirl, for my children to be more like Stargirl, for our community to have more Stargirls dancing and singing to each other. I don’t. 

The story seemed to be addressing the old question : be unique and happy with yourself, or conform and make everyone else happy.

I want for myself, and for my children, to be happy and feel the joy of making others happy. Whether that involves individuality, conformity or blending in to a crowd I don’t think is important. 


For me the thoughts that I took away after reading were more about being loving and caring towards others, sharing kindness and ideals, being gentle and understanding, accepting yourself and others for what they are.   

“The theme of uniformity is an ongoing one”

I questioned Stargirl as an individual character. She was unique in a conforming, structured way. She sang Happy Birthday to people whether they wanted her to or not. At times I found myself uncomfortable in her presence. This didn’t seem to be a girl who was happy in her own skin, with her own ideas. I couldn’t help but feel that Stargirl has had difficulty in ‘fitting in’ in the past, and has taken measures to protect her self from the insecurity she felt. Her individuality seems to me to be her armour of protection. 

I longed to give Stargirl a hug and allow her to feel comfortable enough to let her guard down for just a short while, to stop conforming to non-comformity. 

There was a beautiful point in the book where Stargirl took Leo, her beau to her Enchanted Place and introduced him to meditation. It was beautifully written and captured a tangible sense of friendship and acceptance. This was where I felt closest to Stargirl and glimpsed the girl inside her colourful shell of protection. 

My daughter (12) read the book too and claimed that it was quite unlike anything she had ever read before. An inspiration! What better review than that, from a girl within the target audience? 

We will both be reading the next book, Love Stargirl and comparing notes and using the book as a bounce board for further discussions.


Thanks Ceri!

Book 1/40 Thank-you Sophie

The Spare Room

By Helen Garner

This wonderful book has taken me on an powerful emotional journey. I read it in one afternoon but have thought about it often since. It follows the story of a complex friendship between two older women, a friendship made all the more complex and heart wrenching because one of them is dying. Nicola is a woman in her early 60s in the late stages of cancer. She comes to stay with her friend Helen for a few weeks while she explores alternative therapies to try and cure her cancer. 

The book is about friendship, anger, relationships, anguish and the real issues surrounding death, illness, and palliative care. Their long friendship (of “just” 15 years) is tested to its limits as Nicola continues to believe that she will find a cure for her disease and refuses morphine or palliative care, instead relying on her hope, and the support and care of her friends.

The author portrays the full range of Helen's emotions - grief, anger, resentment, frustration and, eventually, despair as she begins to feel that she really cannot cope - quite wonderfully.

Is three weeks really such a long time? In the circumstances she finds herself floundering in, Helen really is finding it a life sentence.

She is regularly kept awake beyond 2am, "the hour at which the drought, the refugee camps, the dying planet, and all the faults and meannesses of my character would arrive to haunt me".

She notices that the treatment clinic that Nicola attends for vitamin C injections is "painted a strange yellow, the colour of controlled panic"

She wryly observes the half a banana "abandoned in its loose, spotty skin", the blood-red nasturtium that blooms; broad beans standing outside the limits of the threatened house, "in hopeful rows"

She appears to become enraged with her own rage and confusion of complex emotions. 

'The one thing I was sure of, as I lay pole-axed on my bed that afternoon ... was that if I did not get Nicola out of my house tomorrow I would slide into a lime-pit of rage that would scorch the flesh off me, leaving nothing but a strew of pale bones on a landscape of sand.'

The Spare Room has as its initial central character, Nicola, a woman who a has profound denial of her condition. She wants to be strong, prove how unchanged she is, spend time with her friends, yet fight every step of the way to do it. When Nicola comes to recognise for herself that "Death's at the end of this", peace and friendship can link arms once more.

It was a difficult and sometimes painful book to read yet remained sensitive and true, making me smile and even laugh out loud a couple of times. The tears flowed towards the end as I read as slowly as I could manage in order to both prolong my reading, and avoid the inevitable fate of the characters I had come to know so well. The last few pages were so beautifully written without undue sentimentalisation. Honest and true words were used in a remarkable way.

A book about dying? I believe that it is truly about relationships and issues that may face each of us every day in our lives. In the context of this powerful story if we can begin to relate to Nicola and to Helen, empathise with young Bessie, feel like Iris, find ourselves humming or praying while the buddhist friends chant, we may become closer to understanding how we can improve our own friendships. Isn’t this what we all need to do? We don’t know how much time we have left to love...

Thanks Sophie, this was a remarkable book which took my breath away at the end - and then made me feel  uplifted and alive as I breathed a large sigh of relief and happiness