NINETEEN MINUTES: Jodi Picoult: Atria Books: Fiction: 455 pages
Seventeen-year-old Peter Houghton walks into Sterling High one March morning and, in 19 minutes, kills 10 people and wounds many more. Alex Cormier, the judge on the case, struggles to remain objective, although her daughter, Josie, was injured in the incident when she passed out next to her murdered boyfriend. Chapters alternate between the present and the past, where Josie and Peter were childhood friends, to examine the crime and its causes from the perspectives of the shooter and the victims.
This is a remarkable book. Jodi Picoult has a wonderful writing style and always creates very well-constructed, thought-provoking plots. Nineteen Minutes powerfully considers both the brutality of a shooting spree and the brutality inflicted on Peter his entire school career from the privileged popular crowd. Chris Bohjalian’s Before You Know Kindness and Walter Dean Myers’s ya novel Shooter would be great companion books to this one.
MBC
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