This was free, so I can't really say I made a loss on it. But it's seriously in need of editing (I didn't see a chapter with an error in spelling, grammar, continuity etc) and the whole idea of the work is blatant nonsense.
Kids, being sent off to Mars, I can sort of swallow. But being lied to, supposedly forging out on their own and then doing the same thing to their peers is a little too thin, even for a teen romp.
None of the sections work; the opener is soppy, far too much time is spent on a journey to an academy, training is foreshortened, the landing on Mars is silly (nobody's qualified, after all, we missed a shedload of training), and the decisions made post-landing are the sort of thing even a trigger happy Klingon may abjure. The command structure is laughable, the way "the baddy" takes charge is clearly just done for the author's benefit and the whole work exudes a sense of 1950s space opera inexpertly modernized and rather trashed in the process. Remind me to send Holliday a Heinlein juvenile someday and perhaps I'll check out one of his later works in another life.