The Academy - T.Z. Layton

Initial Draw: ☆☆☆☆
Character Development: ☆☆☆☆
Plot/Writing Style: ☆☆☆☆
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

From the cover:

"Born and raised in a small town, twelve-year-old Leo K. Doyle has never seen the ocean or stepped foot on a plane. But Leo is a star soccer player with big dreams in life. Rock-star, Olympic gold, dragon-slaying dreams. While Leo longs to make the pros one day, he has no idea how to achieve this goal - until a professional scout pays a chance visit to one of Leo's games and extends an invitation to try out for the London Dragons youth squad, known as The Academy. 

Leo is stunned. The London Dragons isn't just any old soccer team. It's a world-famous English Premier League team. Soon Leo is off to a whole new country, embarking on the greatest adventure of his life. The downside? Only eleven players can make the team. Eleven out of two hundred of the very best twelve-year-old players on the planet. 

Along with the grueling competition, Leo must also face a bully intent on torpedoing his summer, a roomie who doesn't know how to have fun, a terrifying camp director, and, most of all, Leo's own lack of formal training and the fear he'll never succeed. By the end of the summer, Leo will become a much better player and forever changed by his experience. But will he be good enough to make the Academy?"

📚📚📚 

Let me tell you, between my love for Ted Lasso and my students' love for The Most Beautiful Game, I have such a soft spot for books about soccer. This one has a little bit of a Blue Lock vibe (manga about a mysterious and slightly shady soccer "camp" designed to produce a world-class striker in which any eliminated players are no longer allowed to play soccer), but more wholesome and less mysterious. While I wish Leo's backstory had been developed a bit more, I found him so heartwarming and loveable, and I was rooting for him the whole book.

There was a pretty big cast of side characters, which made it hard to really develop them, but a handful of them were given distinct enough characteristics that I still felt like I got a sense of their personalities. In spite of it not being possible to give each of them the development they deserved, I found the camaraderie between Leo and his fellow Iguanas, including Coach Samantha, very endearing. They came off as sort of an "underdog" team, since the other teams were assigned some of the top players in camp, and watching them grow as a team made the former coach in me happy.

Soccer-wise, it's always tough to write sports action in a book, but I thought Layton did a pretty solid job. I am not SUPER familiar with soccer, but I've pieced together a bit, and that was enough to get a picture of what was going on. I thought the matches, scrimmages, and drills were pretty well written and entertaining, and I was impressed with the balance struck between almost-impossible heroic sports moments and realistic "damn, I fucked that up" plays. The entire book, I kept thinking I knew what was coming only to be taken by surprise, which was a very pleasant surprise, since I started the book thinking I knew exactly how it would all play out. That's on me for getting cocky, I guess.

Anyway, pretty solid book. There are at least two more, and I'm looking forward to getting into them!