By Jerry Spinelli
A new girl wins over a whole high school by being unlike anyone else, then gets shut out cold, and the boy who loves her begs her to just be normal.
Stargirl Caraway shows up at Mica Area High School and does everything nobody does: she plays a ukulele at lunch, cheers for the other team, leaves little presents for people she's never met, and genuinely doesn't seem to care what the crowd thinks of her. For a while the school is charmed. Then it turns. The same students who trailed after her start treating her like she isn't there, no one looking at her, no one speaking to her. Leo, who tells the story, has fallen hard for her, and he can't take being iced out along with her. So he asks her to dial it back, to go by 'Susan,' to be ordinary enough that the school will let them both back in. The question the book won't let go of is whether she should have to do that at all, and what Leo gives up by asking.
The reason this one hits harder than the usual be-yourself story is where the pressure comes from. It isn't one bully or one cruel prank. It's a whole school deciding, quietly and all together, to act like someone doesn't exist. And the person who finally cracks and asks Stargirl to make herself smaller is the boy who loves her, the narrator you've spent the whole book rooting for. For a reader around eleven to thirteen, that lands differently than a villain would: the hardest thing here isn't being told to be cruel, it's being asked to shrink so the group will take you back. Nothing gets tied up at the end. Some readers will still be arguing about it a week later.