Nothing at the Superior Thinking and Advanced Research Academy is as it seems — and Amanda Forsythe, its newest, brightest student, is about to discover why.
Amanda Forsythe, an independent-minded eleven-year-old with a stratospheric intellect, enters her school’s science fair with a project on interstellar travel. Despite its brilliance, the project loses and Amanda is humiliated — that is, until she is approached by two scientists from the STAR Academy. The Academy is an elite boarding school with a simple but ambitious mandate: to cultivate the greatest scientists of tomorrow. They offer Amanda a full scholarship.After taking up residence at the remote, fortress-like Academy, Amanda settles into an exciting life of new friends and supportive teachers, and though everything seems too good to be true, Amanda makes a disturbing discovery. Against almost impossible odds, Amanda must find a way to escape the school and alert the world to what is really going on behinds its walls.
A charming, funny middle-grade novel that combines action, adventure, science, and a big dose of satire from a talented voice in children's literature.
It takes a lot to get four kid geniuses together, even when they're all alumni of the now-shuttered Superior Thinking and Advanced Research Academy. Eleven-year-old leader-of-the-pack, Amanda Forsythe, needs to escape the cluthes of her manicacally entrepreneurial father, determined as he is to captialize on Amanda's fame for outsmarting a pair of aliens posing as teachers at the Academy. And Derek, Evelyn, and Sanjay are separately pursuing their own research projects in different schools around the world, desperate to continue the technological advances they began at the STAR Academy. Only the world's richest man could bring them all together--and that's exactly what George Snootman offers to do. But can they really trust the father of Eugenia, their nemesis at the STAR Academy? Probably not--but his offer is just too tempting. Besides, Amanda is pretty confident she and her friends can outfox him, even if he does seem as ruthlessly determined as the aliens before him to misuse their work
for his own means....