A smart and funny contemporary YA novel about 17-year-old Ethan who works at the crumbling Green Street Cinema and has to learn, along with his eccentric, dysfunctional work family, that fighting for the thing you love doesn''t always turn out like in the movies.
The Green Street Cinema has always been a sanctuary for Ethan. Maybe it''s because movies help him make sense of real life, or maybe it''s because the cinema is the one place he can go to still feel close to his dad, a film professor who died three years ago. Either way, it''s a place worth fighting for, especially when developers threaten to tear it down to build a luxury condos.
They say it''s structurally unsound and riddled with health code violations. They clearly don''t understand that the crumbling columns and even Brando, the giant rat with a taste for sour patch kids, are a part of the fabric of this place that holds together the misfits and the dreamers of the changing neighborhood the cinema house has served for so many years.
Now it''s up to the employees of the Green Street Cinema--Sweet Lou the organist with a penchant for not-so-sweet language; Anjo the projectionist, nicknamed the Oracle for her opaque-but-always-true proclamations; Griffin and Lucas who work the concessions, if they work at all; and Ethan, known as "Wendy," the leader of these Lost Boys--to save the place they love.
It''s going to take a movie miracle if the Green Street is going to have a happy ending. And when Raina, Ethan''s oldest friend (and possible soul mate?), comes back home from Hollywood where she''s been starring in B-movies about time-traveling cats, Ethan thinks that miracle just may have been delivered. But life and love aren''t always like the movies. And when the employees of the Green Street ask what happens in the end to the Lost Boys, Ethan has to share three words he''s not been ready to say: "they grow up."
This Book Is Not Yet Rated is the story of growing up and letting go and learning that love can come in many different forms and from many different sources like the places that shape us, the people who raise us, the lovers who leave us, and even the heroic rodents who were once our mortal enemies.
