Book Review: Nineteen Minutes

The novel Nineteen Minutes by author Jodi Picoult is about a school shooting that takes place in a present day New Hampshire high school. The book's two main characters, Josie and Peter, find themselves facing issues like popularity and true friendship. Josie and Peter had been friends from Kindergarten and loved to be around each other, but when they started to enter middle school, Josie started to climb the popularity ladder and left Peter behind. Growing up, Peter had constantly been bullied, and by the same group that Josie now belonged to. He didn't live up to the expectations set by his parents of his older, now deceased, brother Joey, and that made him feel inferior at home now (like he felt at school already). He felt that he couldn't talk to his parents or his one friend and felt that he needed to end this endless harassment and embarrassment. Through his intense knowledge of computers, he designed a shooting game in which you tried to kill the 'bad guys', which were the personalities of the people who bullied him at school, at in the game, he won. He then decided to play the real-life version of the so-called game, and came to school with guns and bombs one day. And just when you think the story can't get any more interesting, it takes an unexpected turn near the end that is shocking.

Bestselling author Jodi Picoult was born May 19, 1966 in Long Island, NY. She studied creative writing at Princeton and even had two of her short stories published in Seventeen Magazine as a new author. She found other jobs to support an income, and after several, various jobs, she went to Harvard to get her master's degree in education. Most of Picoult's novels discuss controversial topics and social issues that are being dealt with today that most other authors have not dared to write about.
"As a mom of three, I've seen my own children struggle with fitting in and being bullied. It was listening to their experiences, and my own frustrations, that led me to consider the topic. I also kept thinking about how it's not just in high school where we have this public persona that might be different from what we truly feel inside...everyone wonders if they're good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, no matter how old they are. It's an archetypical moral dilemma: do you act like yourself, and risk becoming an outcast? Or do you pretend to be someone you're not, and hope no one finds out you're faking?" -Picoult (Bookreporter)

I loved reading this book, but it also scared me a bit. Since this is such hot topic and since it is so real, knowing that kids in our school are bullied and harassed each day makes me fear that this could happen to us. Also, kids can relate to the fact that whether or not we realize it, we sometimes choose the need to be popular and accepted by others over friendship. The way that Picoult goes back and forth in time, showing different aspects of each side of the story made the book really interesting to read, and I never got bored reading it. This is a book that teens and adults can read because children as well as parents can relay to their own part of the story that relates to them. I think, without a doubt, that Nineteen Minutes is deserving of literary merit and everyone (mostly adolescents) should read it, as it teaches good morals about life.

Sources
http://www.bookbrowse.com/biographies/index.cfm?author_number=601
http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-picoult-jodi.asp