The Academy

June 17, 2013
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 12âup. Agent: John Steele, IMG.

June 1, 2013

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

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