Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Piccoult

I would not call Jodi Piccoult a brilliant writer, in the technical or artistic sense of the word. I love books that can draw me into the story because the writer is able to make everything feel completely real, but with Jodi Piccoult, it is hard for me to forget that I am reading a work of fiction and lose myself in the story. There are clunky moments of dialogue, or descriptions that just don’t quite work, or slightly incongruous time lapses.

But what I will say is that she is a good story teller. I have read two of her novels, and part of a third, and if the writing doesn’t draw me in, the story does. My biggest gripe with Nineteen Minutes was that I guessed the end almost from the beginning, and felt cheated of my surprise as a reader, but knowing the end also didn’t cause me to lose interest. Nineteen Minutes was a good story because the point of the story was not to get to the end, but to tell what happened along the way.

The center of the book is the nineteen minutes of the title, in which a teenage boy sets off a car bomb, walks into the high school, and opens fire on students and teachers. From there, the plot moves both forwards and backwards, gradually constructing not so much the events as the characters—the shooter, a childhood friend who has gone her separate way, the mothers of both of these teenagers, the detective leading the investigation, the defense attorney. To me, the most compelling purpose of the book is that of taking an act that is incomprehensible to most normal human beings, and to try to understand it. The book does not just take you along for the ride—it also asks you to think, and to see yourself in the characters that populate the pages.