Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

Nineteen Minutes is another heart wrenching novel that is written by Jodi Picoult who also wrote My Sister's Keeper.

The book features a teenager called Peter Houghton who is considered an outcast by fellow students. He goes into his high school and shoots fellow class mates as well as some of his teachers.

The writer takes the reader straight into the story by detailing what happened in the nineteen minutes that Peter was in the school with the gun. It also starts by introducing other main characters such as Josie Cormier whose boyfriend gets shot and dies. Alex Cormier is another main character who is Josie's mum and also the district judge assigned to the case.

As the story progresses it delves into the minds of Peter and Josie and the relationship they had as children, that no longer exists as Josie is popular and Peter isn't.

Each chapter reveals something that leads towards the reason as to why Peter felt the need to go into the school and murder some of his fellow students.

Any person who fell into a crowd at school will be able to understand the relationships and situations these characters go through as it is very accurate and shows that not all parents know exactly what their child is going through or thinking.

The story has many twists and the reader is guaranteed to change their feelings on each character at different stages of the book. It does get complex in some parts and become confusing but once the reader gets past that, it is a very powerful story that can trigger a whole host of emotions.

Once again Jodi Picoult has delivered a very interesting novel that shows many different lives intertwining into one incident, with an ending that is both shocking and tear inducing.

Nineteen Minutes

Jodi Picoult

Atria, March 2007, $26.00, 352 pp.

ISBN: 0743495728

It takes nineteen minutes to kill nine students and one teacher and wound 18 students to the extent that they need to be hospitalized. On March 6 2007, seventeen-year-old student Peter Haughton put a pipe bomb he constructed in a student's car as a diversion than went to Sterling High School where he shot a student on the steps, went into the cafeteria wounded and injured a few more, walked the hallways leading to the gym and into the locker room where his killing spree ended when police detective Patrick DuCharme ordered him by gunpoint to drop his weapon.

He was carrying two handguns, two shotguns, and some incendiary devices. Peter tells his lawyer that he killed those who made his life hell since he was in kindergarten when one of the bullies threw his lunchbox out of the school bus window. Peter has been systematically abused verbally, emotionally and physically for the last twelve years because he was a misfit who didn't fit in. His only friend Josie, the daughter of Judge Alex Cormier, was the catalyst that drove him over the edge. His only friend Josie dumped him to be one of the in-crowd and be Matt Reyson's girlfriend. Matt is the last person that Peter killed. His defense attorney Jordan McAfee has to plan a defense even though his client was caught on tape killing students and there were hundreds of witnesses who saw him do the shooting.

Jodi Picoult blends a legal thriller with a family drama and comes up with a fascinating (in a macabre way) work of mainstream fiction. The author doesn't ever excuse what Peter did but through the use of flashbacks and rotating perspectives shows how years of torture erupted in a killing spree. Although readers will loathe Peter for what he did, they will understand that it takes a village to raise a child and in the case of Sterling, New Hampshire, everyone, including his own parents, failed in some way.

Harriet Klausner