Nineteen Minutes by Becca Maples “In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game.  In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five. "Nineteen minutes is how long it took the Tennessee Titans to sell out of tickets to the play-offs.  It’s the length of a sitcom, minus the commercials.  It’s the driving distance from the Vermont border to the town of Sterling, New Hampshire. “In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get it delivered.  You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed.  You can walk a mile.  You can sew a hem. “In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it. “In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge.”   What can’t you do in nineteen minutes?  In a life or death situation – literally – time is of the essence.  Nineteen minutes can feel like a second.  Jodi Picoult’s novel Nineteen Minutes gives a unique view into the mind of one who would, under normal circumstances be considered a “monster.” 17-year-old high school student Peter Houghton is just one of the many who do not fit the mold of what is considered a regular kid.  As an unfortunate result of this, he and his childhood best friend Josie Cormier separate as they mature.  Josie moves on to become a member of the “in” crowd, while Peter is left at the bottom of the social ladder where being bullied and picked on is a way of life.  He reaches his breaking point during his junior year of high school after a particularly embarrassing moment; unable to deal with the emotional stress any longer, Peter goes on a nineteen-minute shooting spree through Sterling High in which ten students lose their lives and another nineteen are injured – and that’s just the first chapter.  Perhaps nineteen minutes was just a little too long in this instance.  The remainder of the novel guides the reader through the aftermath of Peter’s breakdown, the following court case, and the thoughts and reasoning of Peter himself.  I can’t bring myself to spoil the ending, but let’s just leave it at this:  I was utterly stunned, and that doesn’t happen all that often. One of Jodi Picoult’s many talents is the ability to build a complex, ever-changing plot while still enabling the reader to keep track of the goings-on of the characters’ lives.  Nineteen Minutes displays this perfectly.  Switching between the points of view of nearly every character in the story, Picoult creates an organized chaos of events; in order to best illustrate the exact causes of her characters’ actions, she constantly interrupts her own train of thought to relate previous occurrences.  She also uses several metaphors – both spoken and unspoken – that show how seemingly random events can be linked whether one is aware or not.  These attributes are characteristic not only of Nineteen Minutes, but also of Picoult’s writing in general. My overall opinion of Nineteen Minutes is that Jodi Picoult has once again demonstrated her status as an entertaining, daring, and extraordinarily scrupulous writer.  She’s more a spider than an author, weaving an incredibly meticulous web of fictional lives that is both awe-inspiring and easily recognizable to the human eye.  I was most impressed not only with Picoult’s ability to write eloquently and sympathetically about an awful tragedy, but also with her obvious understanding of human emotions and their effects.  Jodi Picoult does not just describe a school shooting; she explains to thousands that even a rampaging “monster” displays the very emotions rooted deep inside each of us.  Picoult humanizes a character who most would unquestionably despise prior to reading this novel, and that is the very reason I heartily recommend Nineteen Minutes to anyone willing to consider the possibility of finding, studying, and maybe even altering his or her own faults and prejudices.