Atheneum Books Just Another Hero: Volume 3

Just Another Hero is a book about teens being carefree, courageous, creative, caring and all around great friends.

Read this book back in high school 2012 and had to read again

Amazing book by an amazing author! In my opinion this author hasn't written one bad book YET!

I have a teenager that really likes this author would recommend to family and friends.

The Jericho Trilogy: First came a story that tackled the issue of hazing, The Battle of Jericho, and then Sharon M. Draper addressed teen pregnancy in November Blues, and now Just Another Hero deals with violence in school... Arielle Gresham and Kofi Freeman are both having problems at home. November Nelson is dealing with being a teen parent and doing her best to keep up her grades so she can graduate with the rest of her class. And Jericho Prescott and Olivia Thigpen are still together. It's senior year and things are going okay at school until one of their peer's decides to bust into the classroom with a grievance and an AK-47.In the first novel, Josh Prescott died and I wasn't happy with that; he was a very likeable young man with his whole life ahead of him. The first thing I thought when I saw this book was, "oh no, I hope another one of these young people isn't going to die" and, of course, I wanted to know if one of them wouldn't make it to the end of the story, hoping they all would. So, I'm reading - bothered by the things Arielle and Kofi had to go through at home, learning how teenage parenting is going for November, finding out about these teens college plans, feeling bad for Osrick Warley, trying to figure out Jack Krasinki, trying to guess who this thief was at school and not liking Chadwick Kensington O'Neil at all - and, even though I was interested in the story, I asked myself, "What does any of this have to do with the book description?" The summary of the book on the jacket flap and the book cover made me believe most of the story would focus on school violence but that was not the case. After a while I could see the connections but there were too many minor details to get to what I thought would be the main focus of the story - the potentially deadly reason why the fire alarm goes off. The story was almost over when the unfortunate incident took place. No, tragedy isn't something I anticipate reading about but I do like emotional reads and that's what I was expecting.I really enjoyed the first two books in the Jericho trilogy, especially November Blues, and I decided after the second book that I was definitely going to read the third. I did like this one but not as much as the others. I'm thinking that was because I felt misled by a synopsis the book cover seemed to confirm. I also would have liked to have seen more of November raising her daughter instead of just hearing about it. There are lots of important lessons (the author touches on quite a few issues besides school violence) for readers to learn, though, and teens will find the high school scenes believable and all the talk of college helpful.