Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

“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.”
-Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes



Nineteen Minutes is a novel about seventeen year old Peter Houghton, a seventeen year old computer geek, “loser,” and student Sterling High School, located in Sterling, New Hampshire. When we first meet Peter, he is introduced as a sweet, innocent child who can’t defend himself. Peter is introduced to guns by his father and he has ideas of how to use them, but doesn’t really develop them. He is tormented by many kids and his only friend is a girl named Josie Cormier. Josie is the only person who accepts Peter for who he is; however, their friendship begins to break as they get older. When Josie and Peter enter high school, Josie becomes one of the popular kids and leaves Peter behind, just like everyone else. She joins the group whose hobby seems to be making fun of Peter and Peter cannot believe it. He is extremely upset and doesn’t know what to do since he was never taught how to defend himself. He finds comfort at his computer and creates a digital world where he can escape all his problems. He creates a video game in which the jocks are the target. This is when he gets the idea that changes the city of Sterling, New Hampshire forever. One day, a group of jocks shanks Peter in the middle of the cafeteria and this embarrassing scene makes him extremely angry. He walks out of the school to his car and plants a grenade in the parking lot; it blows and everyone becomes extremely frightened. Peter unlocks his car and carries out four guns—this marks the beginning of his rampage. Peter walks into the school again and begins shooting at everyone he sees, killing nineteen and wounding ten. His shooting spree begins in the cafeteria and ends in the gym locker room after nineteen minutes. Detective Patrick Ducharme finds Peter shaking in the locker room with unconscious Josie Cormier and her dead boyfriend Matt Royston. Later investigations show that Matt had two bullet holes in his body but only one bullet was fired from the handgun Peter used on the day that changed Sterling forever. The climax of this book takes place when detectives figure out that the second bullet hole in Matt’s body was caused by a gun fired by someone other than Peter—the gun was fired by Matt’s girlfriend, Josie. Josie is sentenced to five years in a women’s penitentiary while Peter is tried for the murders and sentenced to life in prison. One month after his conviction, he commits suicide in his jail cell.

This book takes place in the small city of Sterling, New Hampshire. The novel takes place through a large timeframe because it contains flashbacks from up to seventeen years before the shootings. The main settings are Sterling High School, the location where the shootings occur on March 6, 2007, and the court, where the trial takes place. From reading this book, I think reader’s can learn that as we grow up and away from who we truly are, we don’t realize the damage we do to ourselves and to the people around us. I think Josie Cormier is a prefect example of this. She grows to be on of the popular kid who ends up hurting Peter. I believe that her involvement with the “populars,” being Matt’s girlfriend, and ditching Peter were the main causes for Peter’s rampage. I chose to read this book because the author, Jodi Picoult, is a favorite of mine, and she definitely didn’t disappoint me.

I recommend this book to mature readers due to strong language and very graphic scenes. Nineteen Minutes contains flashbacks and jumps from past to present throughput the book, so if you’re a reader who doesn’t like books like that, I wouldn’t recommend this one. The only thing that I didn’t like about this book is that I couldn’t put it down—once I started reading it, I couldn’t stop because I was so engrossed in the events that took place. Overall, I think Nineteen Minutes is possibly the best book I have ever read.