Zara Summers is a student at Spy School.
She is not an agent - yet. She is in training to become one, although when we first meet her just after she arrived at the prestigious boarding school in Switzerland, she does not yet know that it is Spy School, or that she is soon to be in training.
Confused? Probably not but she is. Our introduction to her finds her standing in the crowded hallway of a school she had only just arrived at, wearing a school uniform for the first time - and feeling ridiculous. She is still in shock, really. "About a week before I was going to start my junior year of high school, my parents informed me that instead of finishing my last two years with my friends, I would be coming here. Then they proceeded to tell me that coming to this school is an honor. Which makes me wonder even more-why was this school interested in me to begin with? There is nothing special about me. My parents, they are the special ones. I'm just the offspring."
Summers stands 5.2", is very pretty with lovely blonde hair as would seem to befit a girl raised on the beaches of Malibu in sunny Southern California. While she loved her life, she has had to deal with the likelihood that people trying to befriend her were only doing so to get close to her famous parents. Her mom is a very famous and successful Grammy-award winning singer; her father a well known former pitcher for the Giants; her step-father a highly regarded and like movie star. Summers is used to, though not so happy with, living in their shadows. Not so at Spy School where she finds she is just like everyone else, a new and enjoyable feeling for her.
So, back to the subject of Spy School, which is what the other students call it much to Summers' confusion because to her it had another name and the whole business of 'spy' was never mentioned in the rush to uproot her and send her there. We are told that having someone other than a freshman show up to attend is absolutely unheard of and yet here she is.
Some of the classes are strange to say the least, such as Accent Class which most really detest and which Summers finds she does not need because she has always been great at picking up on the way people talk thanks to her travels with her mother. And then there is PE which she thought would be a breeze but then found doing a hundred pushups was way outside her capabilities. And what is this talk about learning to be "a spy, an assassin, a ninja" as a fellow student tells her?
There is a whole lot of changes headed Zara Summers way and a bunch of surprises. Such as who she really is and why she was sent to Spy School in the first place.