Nineteen Minutes - Jodi Picoult
My TBR is so big that I have decided to just grab the first book I see and read it while I have time before the spring semester starts! I bought Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult a few years ago but never got around to reading it. I haven’t read many of her novels, and I honestly thought this one was quite new… Until I saw that it was actually set in 2007! (Which is when it was also published). How many school shootings have happened since then? Countless is probably the best word… Countless.
This is a very, very hard book to read. The main storyline is that of a school shooting where Peter Houghton, a 17 year old, walks into his high school one day and goes on a shooting spree, killing 9 students and 1 teacher, and injuring many others. Peter is caught alive, and what follows is the story of what happens after the day, and also what happened before. The story is told from different perspectives: Peter’s, but also his mother and father’s, his old friend turned enemy Josie’s, his lawyer, the lead detective on the case, and Josie’s mother, who is a judge.
I don’t think any of us really think of school shooters as anything other than evil, but this novel tries to humanize everyone involved, without removing any guilt. It’s particularly hard to read because you really don’t want to have any sympathy whatsoever for Peter, and at times, you do. That’s where I struggled the most, where I felt sorry for the way he had been bullied incessantly from an early age.
There is no happy ending in a novel like this, but it does force you to think about every person involved in the shooting, and how maybe, if things had been a little different, maybe it would never have happened. In my opinion in the end this book is a great anti-bullying message, but it never makes light out of what Peter does. A fine line to walk on and I think the author does it very well. That said, this is fiction, and it reads as fiction - you know full well that not everything is as it seems, and not everything will end in the way you think it would end. If you are looking for insight into why a person “snaps” like this, I don’t think this is where you will find it.
I just wish this novel didn’t hit so close to home.