Nineteen MinutesJodi Picoult
In Sterling, New Hampshire, 17-year-old high school Student Peter Houghton had endured years of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of classmates. His best friend, Josie Cormier, succumbed to peer pressure and now hangs out with the popular crowd that often instigates the harassment. One final incident of bullying sends Peter over the edge and leads him to commit an act of violence that forever changes the lives of Sterling's residents.
Even those who were not inside the school that mornign find their lives in an upheaval, including Alex Cormier. The superior court judge assigned to the Houghton case, Alex - whose daughter, Josie, witnessed the events that unfolded - must decide whether or not to step down. She's torn between presiding over the biggest case of her career and knowing that doing so will cause an even wider chasm in her relationship with her emotionally fragile daughter. Josie, meanwhile, claims she can't remember what happened in the last fatal minutes of Peter's rampage. Or can she? And Peter's parents, Lacy and Lewis Houghton, ceaselessly examine the past to see what they might have said or done to compel their son to such extremes. Nineteen Minutes also features the return of Jodi Picoult's characters - defense attorney Jordan McAfee from The Pact and Salem Falls, and Patrick DuCharme, the intrepid detective introduced in Perfect Match.
Rich with psychological and social insight, Nineteen Minutes is a riveting, poignant, and thought-provoking novel that has at its center a haunting question. Do we ever really know someone?
i wasn't there the night this one was discussed, but i read most of it. it was difficult for me to finish. at one point i think i closed it, put it away and never turned back. so, maybe i don't have the right to review it. still, i thought i'd read enough to try.
ReplyDeletenineteen minutes tackles such a huge issue, which is a courageous move on the part of jodi picoult, and i commend her for that. some of my favorite literature and films dare to look at a truth that most of us are afraid of. that being said, i had some issues with her approach.
at times, i felt she spent too much time shocking us with gory details - the shots, the blood, etc. we didn't need the minutes fo this meeting, really. we have the background knowledge. we know what's going on, and we certainly don't need to be reminded in order to better understand her story.
then, woven into the morbid play-by-play, i felt picoult spends way too much time emphasizing the outer beauty of certain characters (i.e. "she twisted her thick copper hair into a knot and anchored it at the base of her neck with bobby pins," and later "her chestnut hair was a knotty ponytail"). the elaborate, flowery descriptions of characters' outer beauty seemed really inappropriate here. i don't think i was ever completely comfortable with a book that combined soap opera language with a topic as heavy as a school shooting. the only character the author dared to describe in an "ugly" way was (of course) the shooter, which did little in the way of satiating my desire for real, human characters, but rather struck me as offensive that she'd fall so easily into a dangerous stereotype: that a school shooter has to have bad skin and dark clothes. i thought this was a shame.
maybe she was simply writing to entertain. i suppose it was meant to be a "quick read" with more bubble gum and fluff than art. my problem remains - i wasn't comfortable with this style as it's used to describe a school shooting. it reminds me more of children acting out the situation with their barbies, complete with unrealistic drama and an overemphasis on physical appearance. true, foer's novel addressing 9/11 had some out-there techniques and fanciful details (tons of them, i know), but then it makes me think of a quote i'd read by aristotle: "a convincing impossibility is superior to an unconvincing possibility." nineteen minutes was an unconvincing possibility.