The Academy: Game On
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, VAα(c) Copyright 2013.  Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc.  No redistribution permitted.