Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

I found this book through Fiction Connection, and it told me that this was a "thriller", although I think my ideas of what a thriller is and theirs may differ slightly.

Nineteen Minutes is about a school shooting, where the shooter kills 10 people in the span of nineteen minutes and wounds many more. The accused is a teenager named Peter, a scrawny kid who has been bullied his whole life, by his peers, his own brother, with no one offering protection. His only "friend" is Josie, a girl from his childhood who would rather be popular than be seen with Peter and risk being tormented. The book is made up of several flashbacks, and right away, the reader is intended to feel sympathetic towards Peter, with all of the torture and verbal abuse that he endures. These parts of the book were very difficult and unsettling to read, because I DID feel sympathetic toward the character. Anyone who's ever been teased before in school feels a connection to these stories, which is what I'm sure Picoult wanted. She wanted the reader to see that no crime, in particular, the murder of 10 "jocks and popular kids", is black and white. Did the kids deserve to be shot? No, but it makes the reader think and challenge their own personal beliefs, which is always a good thing.

My issue with the book is that it was extremely predictable. 1/4 of the way in, I knew how the book was going to end, and although a friend reassured me there was a twist at the end, I was correct in my assumptions. Also, there were a lot of characters to keep track of, and I was never quite sure who the "main character" was. Peter? Josie? Josie's mom? Despite my qualms about the story, I simply could not put this book down; I just wanted to keep reading, right up to the anti-climactic ending.

4/5 stars