Banned Books Week is just around the corner. My local library’s book club wanted us to choose which banned book we wanted to read. I opened the suggestions up to my viewers on YouTube and the winning book is Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. My wife loves this book, so I picked it up and started reading. Should this be banned? And more importantly, will Voidy consume Nineteen Minutes?
Summary
On March 6th, 2007, at 10:19 am, Peter Houghton killed ten people and wounded many more. Patrick, a cop, rushed into the school and found Peter in a locker room. Peter surrendered to the police. Josie was lying next to her boyfriend on the floor of the locker room unharmed except for a minor scrape. Her boyfriend died in the shooting and is the only person shot twice.
Why did Peter do it? The rest of the book bounces back and forth from past and present giving the reader a perspective of history to the events which led to the school shooting. We see the repeated failures to protect Peter from bullying by nearly everyone. We also see how Josie felt pressured to be a popular girl and the impact that it had on her life. The trial is overwhelmingly against Peter until a revelation during witness testimony.
The drama of defending a school shooter and finding out what happened pulls the reader along as we explore the pressures of being a teenager. To add insult to injury, Josie’s mother, Alex, is the Superior Judge of New Hamshire and refuses to recuse herself from the case. She believes she can maintain impartiality, but the case may have rattled her more than she thinks.
Scoring
Character – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Her characters are marvelous. This is one of the things I enjoyed about this book from the get-go. I understand what the characters want, what they fear, how they think, and why they behave the way they do. The character work is great, and the narration reinforces the characters while we are in their POV. When we are in a teenage girl’s POV, the narration reads slightly more immature than when we are in an adult’s POV. Well done!
Setting – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The settings in this book are done very well. I can’t think of a setting where I struggle to imagine the place. This is due to the familiarity of all the locals in the novel. So many of them are common to us that she can do quite a lot without having to belabor the point when it comes to the setting. Just a few words and some blocking are enough to ground us in the world.
Plot – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The plot almost scored a perfect 5, but there are two things present in the novel that knocked it down. First, the pantsing of Peter where his genitals are shown is witnessed by a teacher who breaks up the scuffle. Yet the incident is not in the record of bullying Peter endured. I understand the perpetrators are jocks, but a teacher would be risking their career if they didn’t report the jock. I was in high school in 2007 (I feel old saying that) and all the teachers were extremely cautious about behavior that bordered on illegal or career-ending. I just don’t feel that is accurate. Jodi could have just had Peter run away from the scene like he does anyway without having the teacher present to break it up. This would explain why it wasn’t in the record of bullying and would have accomplished the desired result. Otherwise, we need to know why the teacher didn’t report it and observe the fallout of this career-ending mistake. The teacher witnessing the pantsing has plot ramifications that Jodi doesn’t explore.
Second, at the end of the novel when Alex and Patrick are sitting in the school waiting for the one-year mark to pass, the school does nothing to mark the moment. No announcement or moment of silence. I find this to be unrealistic. It is almost proforma that something like this would take place. It feels unbelievable to have the occasion go unmarked. This point of contention could be in the setting section, but because it is part of the plot resolution with Alex’s character, I think this criticism belongs here.
Form – ⭐⭐⭐
There isn’t anything special with form. The back-and-forth timelines through interspersed analepsis have been done many times before. However, Jodi doesn’t introduce any flaws in the form either. The form is executed to a conventional standard.
Quality – ⭐⭐⭐⭐
There is one thing that drove me absolutely crazy about the writing. There are instances where Jodi is in one character’s POV and suddenly we get a sentence that feels as if it is the POV of another. Here’s an example:
“Lacy looked up, the baby carrier balanced in the crook of her arm. It took a moment to place the face–she hadn’t seen Alex since her initial visit nearly a month ago.” –Picoult, Jodi. 2020. Nineteen Minutes (p. 31). New York: Emily Bestler Books/Atria Books.
This is in a section where Alex is the main POV character. The POV character (Alex) is making assumptions about the other person (Lacy) in the conversation, but it doesn’t read like this. The issue is that Jodi relies on the reader to assume these are Alex’s thoughts to account for the POV shift. Alex is thinking that Lacy hasn’t seen her in nearly a month. However, the sentence reads as if this is a fact, which only Lacy would know. We need something to indicate we are still in Alex’s POV while speculating about Lacy’s thoughts. If we leave it this way, this sentence is jarring for a reader. The style Jodi has opted for is one scene/section in one POV, and this breaks that style.
Enjoyment – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐x 2
My number one criterion for whether I will award full marks on enjoyment is if I can’t put it down. There were multiple times when I fought having to put the book down to go to bed or get to work. I give it full stars because I was so entranced by the novel.
Conclusion & Video
Nineteen Minutes might be banned in some places, but it deserves a spot on my bookshelf. The composite score for Nineteen Minutes is 31 stars. That makes it a good book just shy of a great book in the LTM scoring system. The subject matter is sensitive, and entirely relevant too often in our modern world, but only fools and villains would ever ban books.
Not this time Voidy!
Want my take on this book banning and book bans in general? Watch this video.
