Me and Banksy
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A Banksy-style protest against cameras in classrooms brings a group of middle-grade students together. For fans of Rebecca Stead, Susin Nielsen and Gordon Korman.
Dominica's private school is covered in cameras, and someone is hacking into them and posting embarrassing moments for the whole school to see. Like Ana picking her nose. When Dominica quickly changes her shirt from inside out in what she thinks is the privacy of a quiet corner in the library, she's shocked -- and embarrassed -- to discover a video has captured this and is currently circulating amongst her schoolmates. So mortifying, especially since over the past three years, they've had a half-dozen school talks about social media safety.
Who has access to the school security cameras and why are they doing this? Dominica and her best friends, Holden and Saanvi, are determined to find out, and in the process start an art-based student campaign against cameras in the classroom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Many stories of teens and technology focus on social media, but Kyi's sharply executed novel takes on the larger question of living in a panoptic society. Dominica Rivers, in eighth grade at a private school for gifted students, receives a flood of unwanted attention when a video from the school's vast network of security cameras shows her "stripping" in the empty library in actuality, she flipped her shirt when she realized it was inside out. Her best friends, dysthymic former child star Holden and budding hacker Saanvi, plot ways to stop what fast becomes an epidemic of found footage. But Dominica, who has recently become interested in street artist Banksy thanks to her gallery owner grandmother, prefers a trickster-esque approach and begins tagging the security cameras' blind spots with activist messages. The usual crushes and love triangles abound, and cameras and social media form a fourth protagonist as complex and unpredictable as the human players. Kyi (Mya's Strategy to Save the World) examines the large and small impacts of living in a surveillance society, but her faith in youth and art makes this story anything but dystopian. Ages 10 up.
