Review of “Nineteen Minutes” by Jodi Picoult
Jodi Picoult is one of my favorite authors, so you can imagine how thrilled I was when I saw a book I hadn’t read by her when I last visited the library. This award winning author did not fail to deliver, as she always does. NINETEEN MINUTES is a book that is both disturbing and thought provoking. Tackling a tough subject, a school shooting, this book delves into the mind of the killer, a seventeen year old boy who has been bullied his entire life by the popular kids. But what Jodi Picoult does so well is give us a neutral view, as a narrator is always supposed to do, of then mind sets of all the players; the killer, his parents, and the popular girl who once was his best friend but ditched him when it became obvious he would hold her back from ‘belonging’. Peter is the boy who lost it, who kills 10 students and wounds 19 more. Josie is the girl who was his best friend since they were babies. Alex is Josie’s mother, a judge, and Lacy is Peter’s mother, Lewis his father. The nightmare these people go through in the wake of Peter’s massacre is as real as it gets without having to actually experience something this horrible. The evidence is all there, the sign posts that nobody saw, and though Peter is never vindicated for his actions, we come to understand the how and why of this terrible tragedy.
In a country where what you are, what you wear, and who you hang around with is so much more important than who you are, every parent should make NINETEEN MINUTES required reading, as should schools. The in crowd could learn a lot about how to treat other people. The beginning of understanding could maybe save lives in the real world by getting into the head of a misfit.
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