The Final Cut
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
An hilarious coming-of-age story about home, friendship, and learning that sometimes the most exciting adventures happen behind-the-scenes.
Alex Davis is convinced that seventh grade is going to be his year. After spending all summer at skate camp, he knows he’ll finally be seen as one of the “cool kids” . . . until he’s mistakenly put in the wrong elective. Now, instead of taking a popular video games class with his friends, he’s stuck in Filmmaking with hipster teacher Pablo and a group of eccentric classmates.
But when it’s announced that their films will be entered in the school’s annual Golden Reel competition, Alex becomes determined to claim first prize and salvage his seventh-grade year.
With the help of his longtime crush, his best friend, and a peculiar new student, Alex sets out to make a masterpiece. Soon he discovers that someone is trying to sabotage his film and finds himself embroiled in a mystery—one that leads him and his crew to conniving classmates, traitorous teachers, and even corrupt city politicians!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brooklynite Alexander Davis seeks to engineer a fresh start for seventh grade at affluent Saint Anselm's, embracing a new look and nickname, and hoping to get into a coveted elective class on video game theory. But when Alex, who reads as white, ends up in film studies, he's partnered with popular Priti Sharma, of Indian descent, and pale-skinned, tech-security obsessed Theo Schatten to produce a film and compete in the school's 50th anniversary Golden Reel film festival. Soon, sabotage threatens to derail the filming of their movie as well as construction of a local building development that Alex's building commissioner father is overseeing. The group scrambles to uncover the source, suspecting a rival teacher's film students, local citizens who want to preserve the neighborhood, and a local politician. Didactically rendered social justice lessons sometimes take an awkward tone in Markell's (The Ghost in Apartment 2R) otherwise humorously told mystery, but plenty of snappy dialogue and reluctant camaraderie make for an appealing neighborhood caper. Ages 10–up.
