Thirteen-year-old Houston Williams is smart. Very smart. So no one is surprised when he earns a scholarship to attend a prestigious NASA space camp. At the training facility he immediately bonds with his new team, including a girl named Teal. He also clashes with a girl on a rival team named Ashley, who matches or beats him in every exercise. The three of them impress the directors so much they are invited to join a top-secret research project that studies how space travel affects people of different ages. But only two of them will actually be going into space. Houston will do whatever it takes to make sure he’s picked.

Eric Walters’s newest series opens with a contest disguised as a space camp. The premise—young teens training for and unknowingly competing for an opportunity to become an astronaut—is obviously appealing, especially to readers who like high-stakes adventure and stories about space. Through Houston’s eyes we get to see all the different elements of astronaut training, from puzzle building underwater to zero-gravity simulations in airplanes. These aspects of training are brought realistically and believably to life by Walters, who actually attended such a space camp as part of his research for this book. The concepts of commitment and teamwork carry throughout the novel.