Fredrick Mckissack's Shooting Star

I read the realistic fiction story Shooting Star by Fredrick McKissack Jr. for my realistic fiction book talk assignment.

The setting of the story takes place in a town called Cranmer. The main character Jomo a football player who is tired of being good but not good enough because he is undersized. When he comes across the idea of using steroids to get bigger he rejects the idea because he knows it's wrong. But, he convinces himself there is no downside and when he finally decides to try it he gets all of the attention and loves it. But, little does he know they begin to change his personality and this creates big issues with close friends and his family. But, Jomo doesn't get off the steroids and instead he doesn't want to admit that he has

Within the book I found things I like and didn't like. Two things I liked about the book were the way the main character changes throughout the story and how the story teaches an important life lesson the character learns. Firstly, I like how Jomo starts out as a perfect kid who is great in school and in sports but is seen as not big enough. Then when he feels like a workout plan isn't enough he takes the easy way out by doing steroids and really changes him as a person. He starts to make countless mistakes with his friends and eventually learns what he did was very wrong. Next, the important lesson the character learns is you should never take the easy way out by breaking the rules even if you think there is no downside to your situation. Jomo learned this lesson when he decided to take the easy way out by taking steroids when he was told there was no side effects to the drug. But, really the drug changed the way he acted, he had many sudden fits of rage that he couldn't control and he made a lot of mistakes with close friends. Two things I didn't like were the story takes a long time to develop into the main conflict and there wasn't really much of a big secondary character throughout the story. Firstly, course there were a couple of little conflicts building up to the main one like when Jomo was told he wasn't big enough to be a really great football player and decided to get bigger but, the main conflict with the steroids wasn't introduced until later in the story. Finally, there wasn't any big secondary characters in the book, The book included many characters that appeared throughout the story consistently but, there was no secondary character that stood out to me as a big part of the book that really contributed to Jomo changing throughout the