Explorer Academy: The Nebula Secret, by Trudi Trueit

If you have kids around who love (or loved) the 39 Clues series (by which I mean kids who like to read about kids following clues on wild adventures around the world), who also love technology of the very cuttingest edge, and elite schools where high tech survival games are the core of the curriculum, here is good news--they will love the Explorer Academy series from National Geographic Kids Books!

The first book, The Nebula Secret, is out today.  It introduces the young hero, Cruz Coronado, a 12 year-old Mexian-American surfer dude from Hawaii whose mom used to work as a scientist at the Academy before she died in an accident there (a mysterious sort of accident....).  Cruz is accepted into the Academy (a place sort of like Hogwarts for science), and is thrilled to start training as an explorer with his diverse classmates from around the globe.  At first his days there are full of ordinary school-for-the-brilliant sort of happenings, and full of science-y goodness, but then Cruz starts picking up clues that his mother's death wasn't just a sad accident.

And so after this set up first volume, Cruz is launched into a dangerous hunt for the secret she hid from everyone but him...putting his own life in danger!

It's fun, fast, geeky, has lots of full color illustrations that help move things along briskly, and it should be a hit with its target audience.  Here's the book's website if you want to learn more!

nb--I stuck a science fiction label on it, because a lot of the tech is not exactly mainstream yet, but I have reservations about this because, as explained in a note at the end, it is within the realm of near-future possibility (4-D printing, for instance.....)