Stellaluna

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Stellaluna is a female fruit bat who separated from her mother as an infant by an owl attack. After a long fall, she lands in a bird's nest. The mother bird reluctantly takes Stellaluna under her wing on the condition that Stellaluna eats bugs and acts like a proper bird. This is in order to keep her from being a bad influence on the mother bird's actual offspring. When Stellaluna grows up, she begins to notice the differences between herself and her adoptive siblings and realizes that she is a fruit bat. The book ends on the note that even though their adoptive family may be outwardly different, they're family, regardless, and still very much the same at heart.

Stellaluna is a short children's book published by author/illustrator Janell Cannon in 1993. It was made into an animated straight-to-DVD adaptation with a mixed critical response, as well as a Living Books interactive CD-ROM and a puppet show in Oregon.

Tropes used in Stellaluna include:


  • An Aesop:
    • The message of the book can be boiled down to: you should be true to yourself and your family will love you anyway. Or alternatively: Adoptive families can be just as loving as biological ones because deep down, people have more in common than they think.
    • Another Aesop is you can't assume one culture or social behavior is the "right" one. Stellaluna has a lot of problems being a bird because her body is designed to eat fruits, not bugs, she is supposed to sleep during the day and hang upside-down from trees, not fly during the day and huddle in a nest at night. Poor Stellaluna needs a crash course in actual bat culture when she meets a fruit bat like her who is befuddled that she is hanging by her thumbs from a tree, asking her why she is upside down, because Mother Bird shamed her and made her promise to never hang upside down.
  • Animal Talk
  • Bat Out of Hell: Thoroughly averted. The protagonist is a cute fruit bat struggling to fit in.
  • Big Sister Instinct: When her bird siblings are about to crash in the dark, Stellaluna quickly rescues them. She makes sure to get them to a tree where they can catch their breath.
  • Black Sheep: Considering the fact that Stellaluna is a fruitbat in a family of songbirds, it would be nearly impossible for her to not be a Black Sheep.
  • Cool Big Sis: Stellaluna's siblings treat her as a cool big sister that they'd like to emulate. When Mama Bird catches them all dangling from the nest by their feet she is not happy. Later, they happily join her on a night flight.
  • Cute Clumsy Girl: Stellaluna's inability to land on branches like her siblings makes her come off as one of these.
  • Everyone Has Standards: When Stellaluna finds a colony of bats that take her in, they're horrified on learning that Mother Bird forced her to eat bugs, sleep at night, and never hang upside down. The first thing they do is introduce her to a giant peach, and promise she'll never have to eat a bug again.
  • Foreign Queasine: Naturally, the prospect of eating bugs doesn't appeal to a frugivore.
  • Good Parents: When Stellaluna is reunited with her biological mother she's happy to finally have someone who understands and knows how to care for fruit bats.
  • Happily Adopted: Stellaluna may not have the best relationship with her adoptive mother, but she truly does love and care for her siblings, and they for her.
  • Not So Different
  • Owl Be Damned: An owl attack was the reason why Stellaluna was separated from her birth mother in the first place.
  • I Just Want to Be Normal: Initially Stellaluna wishes that she could be more like her other siblings. She can't land or perch on branches like they can, and she doesn't like the same food or want to sleep the same hours or even in the proper position.
  • Meaningful Name: Stellaluna - Star Moon.
  • Meddling Parents: A lot of the tension between Stellaluna and her adoptive mother stem from the fact that Mother Bird wants Stellaluna to be more like a bird.
  • Oblivious Adoption: After a while Stellaluna seems to forget that she's a fruit bat and appears to be genuinely surprised that fruits are delicious and that she can see in the dark.
  • Shown Their Work: While admittedly it was a rather short book, Janell Cannon managed to portray fruit bats rather accurately and never once fell victim to common stereotypes and misconceptions about bats.
  • Super Senses: Stellaluna's siblings can hardly see anything at night and they don't have much of a sense of smell. Compared to them, Stellaluna practically has Super Senses.
  • The Unfavourite: Stellaluna.

The DVD adaptation provides examples of:

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