How Can 19 Minutes Change the World?

What can you do in nineteen minutes? You can take a shower and brush your teeth. Perhaps you can also drop your child off at school or make coffee. Or you can kill 10 people and wound 19 others at your high school.

Jodi Picoult's latest novel, Nineteen Minutes, demonstrates yet again that Picoult can handle all perspectives of extremely controversial topics with deftness and sensitivity. Nineteen Minutes, set in a small town in Northern New Hampshire (affectionately termed "the North Country") examines how a small town, in which everyone knows everyone else, deals with a tragic high school shooting.

Picoult introduces us to the main characters - Peter Houghton and Josie Cormier - pretty much right away in her attempts to explain how and why a 17 year old would go on a shooting rampage in any high school, let alone his own one. What I found to be particularly effective was how Ms. Picoult would jump around in time; she didn't stick to a typical, linear storytelling model. We learn about Peter's first day in Kindergarten, where an older boy rips away his lunch box and destroys it, in between chapters about the present. The juxtaposition, as a result, made the acts committed by Peter seem all the more powerful. As usual, Ms. Picoult's writing style, the words that she chooses and her sentence structure are eloquent, simple and accessible.

While I generally liked how Picoult handled this situation, particularly in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, there were some aspects of her novel that were disheartening. I found that some of the interactions between her characters were stereotypical and predictable. I was able to finish conversations between nerds and jocks or teachers and students or boyfriends and girlfriends in my mind before my eyes finished the words on the page. I also didn't find how she had the legal actors in the novel act; it was completely unrealistic. For example, a homicide trial such as this one, would take years to get to trial, if it ever did, because of the complicated legal and scientific issues that take over in the case. In Picoult's novel, it seemed to take only months. Also, Josie's mother was the presiding judge in the court that the trial would take place in. Any judge in that position would have taken themselves off the case immediately and not waited for a defense attorney or state's attorney to do something to prompt them to recuse themselves.

That being said, Ms. Picoult still did a masterful job in showing how nineteen minutes can change the world.