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Summary
Summary
The Academy is an International Sports Mecca for teen athletes of all sports. There are only two ways in. Deep pockets or enough talent to score a scholarship.
Young tennis star Maya's dreams have finally come true when she earns a scholarship to The Academy. Plucked from her small town, Maya moves to the sports training facility/boarding school to (hopefully) start the beginning of her pro career. But Maya's fantasy of The Academy doesn't quite match the reality. Because where there are hot, talented teens, there's a lot of drama. Meet the players:
Cleo: Maya's rebel/punk roommate who is nearing the top of the golf world.
Renee: The gorgeous swimmer with enough money to buy her way into The Academy.
Nicole: A tennis star who feels threatened by Maya (but she'd never admit it).
Travis: The son of The Academy owner--perfectly groomed to be the next NFL star.
Jake: Travis' younger brother--the bad boy to his brother's good.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-Tennis player Maya Hart, 16, has tried for years to make it into the Academy, an elite private school for the top athletes in the country. When she is accepted, she meets Nicole King, who at 17 is already a top-ten-ranked tennis superstar and discovers that life inside the Academy gates is cutthroat. The owner, former Super Bowl champion Nails Reed, has no patience for mediocrity, especially among scholarship students like Maya. The naive protagonist falls hard for Nails's son Travis but seems destined to remain low on the Academy hierarchy. When wealthy Renee befriends her and makes her over, she catches Travis's eye and is swept up into a world of spur-of-the-moment plane trips, shopping sprees, and wild parties. Although it seems that she is living a dream, Maya starts having mixed feelings about Travis and his bad-boy brother, Jake. The plot reaches a climax in Hollywood, where Nicole and Maya try out for a part in a movie. Maya realizes that Nicole has been pretending to be her friend in order to undermine all that is important in her life. The teen is devastated and almost decides to leave the Academy, but realizes in a cliff-hanger ending that if she does, Nicole will have won. This book is light on character development and heavy on melodrama, but it's a passable choice for readers who can't get enough of series like Cecily von Ziegesar's "Gossip Girl" and Zoey Dean's "The A-List" (both Little, Brown).-Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Seles won nine Grand Slam titles before her 20th birthday, and she bases her first novel on her experience at an elite sports school. But this first book in the Academy series fails to deliver, most fundamentally by including disappointingly little about tennis. Instead, Seles and coauthor LaRosa serve up a lackluster melodrama about backstabbing rich kids. Maya Hart, a "sixteen-year-old have-not from central New York with absolutely no connections whatsoever," wins a scholarship to the Academy, "without question, the greatest sports training facility in the world." She immediately runs afoul of reigning school doyenne Nicole King, already a world-class tennis player, but catches the eye of star quarterback Travis Reed. Maya bunks with another scholarship student, a conflicted Chinese golfer, until a makeover from a rich classmate reveals Maya's stunning beauty and new doors open for her. Seles touches on the expectations for female athletes to conform to a certain standard of beauty, but readers may sense a missed opportunity to gain greater insight into the psychological and physical pressures of competitive sports. Ages 12-up. Agent: John Steele, IMG. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Aspiring tennis pro Maya is the new girl; Cleo is the sympathetic roomie; Nicole is the mean girl; Travis and Jake are the two hottie brothers. Save for the fact that Cleo is gay, everything about this first entry in a projected series set at a super-exclusive sports academy is formulaic, including the vapid prose: "[his muscles] were so defined they looked painted on. By God." (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Tennis champion Seles draws on her experience as a teen athlete to launch a series set in an exclusive sports academy. Maya Hart, a working-class teen from Syracuse, finally gets the prize she has worked tirelessly to achieve: a place at the world's premier sports-training academy. Almost as soon as she arrives, though, she finds herself socially in over her head. There is a huge gulf between the scholarship students and the spoiled kids of privilege. All of the pluck Maya used to get to the Academy buckles when she runs afoul of the Academy's star of tennis and endorsements, Nicole King. With the encouragement of her gutsy, punk-golfer roommate, she holds her ground, but she still needs the help of the owner's son, Travis (and her biggest crush), to avoid expulsion. Despite her rocky start, it appears she and the upper echelon will bond, and she even moves into their storied "villa." But Nicole has no plan to share her status. "There can only be one queen bee at the Academy. And it's not you." This is a series premise with a lot of potential: The world of high-stakes athletics and its impact on teens hungry to succeed is compelling. Unfortunately, there is not enough sports action to balance the "mean girls" intrigue. Still, the premise will attract readers, and the cast of characters is varied and interesting enough to hold them. (Fiction. 12 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Maya has been accepted to the Academy, an exclusive, private institution for promising teen athletes. Hoping this will be the chance she needs to make it into professional tennis, Maya intends to do whatever it takes to fit in there and it takes a lot. Gossip Girl meets professional sports here, and it is a page-turning flurry of teen drama and intense competition. Coauthor and acclaimed tennis player Seles teams up with LaRosa to create a new kind of high school, filled with insanely wealthy teenagers and no adult supervision. Maya is accepted into the most elite clique at the Academy, but after the clique's shiny, expensive exterior fades, she learns that once you are in, it's hard to get out. Readers who like sports, romance, drama, or a dangerous combination of all three this new teen series is for you.--Fort, Bethany Copyright 2010 Booklist