"In 19 minutes, you can mow the front lawn, colour your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In 19 minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it. In 19 minutes, you can get revenge."
So begins Jodi Piccoult's emotional thriller, Nineteen Minutes.
Piccoult, who gained fame with her dramatic novel My Sister's Keeper, tells the heartbreaking story of a messed-up 17-year-old, Peter Houghton, who enters his high school in Sterling, New Hampshire, USA, with guns and starts shooting at random. The 19-minute rampage results in a dramatic change for everyone in the school and also for the residents of the town.
His story
It's almost impossible to look at a mass murderer with sympathy and pity, and yet Piccoult shows us his side of the story – the muddled, humiliated mindset of the so called "cold-blooded" killer, and the events that led up to the crime.
She doesn't justify the crime, but she does make us feel sorry, and a little ashamed, for what the boy had been through for 17 years before he committed the appalling crime.
The incident, the consequences and the past as well, are told by several characters, including Peter, his mother, the detective, judge and lawyer on the case, and the prime witness, Josie, who also happens to be Peter's childhood best friend. Josie, pressured by lawyers and the state, struggles to remember the events of the shooting, all the while trying her hardest to hide a secret of her own. What follows is a tumultuous trial and verdict.
The novel leaves us torn between wanting justice for the families of the deceased, and just wanting to forgive Peter and erase the abject pain, humiliation, betrayal and hatred that have plagued him all his life. We start looking at Peter as a victim instead of a criminal – a victim who commits a crime in revenge.
The book leads us to question the nature of society and the reasons why different people are shunned and bullied. It's engaging, compelling, and one of Picoult's better novels.
— The writer is a communciations studies student at the Mount Carmel College, Bangalore, India
Author of the week: Jodi Picoult
Born and raised in Nesconset on Long Island, New York, Picoult wrote her first story at age 5, entitled The Lobster Which Misunderstood. Picoult went on to study creative writing at Princeton. Following her graduation, she held varied jobs: as a copywriter at an ad agency, as an editor at a textbook publisher, and as a grade 8 English teacher, before entering Harvard to pursue a master's in education.
Her debut novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale, was published in 1992; she has written 14 novels since then.
In 2003 she was awarded the New England Bookseller Award for Fiction. She has also received an Alex Award from the Young Adult Library Services Association, the Book Browse Diamond Award for novel of the year; a lifetime achievement award for mainstream fiction from the Romance Writers of America; and Cosmopolitan magazine's 'Fearless Fiction' Award 2007.
Recently, she wrote five issues of the Wonder Woman comic book series for DC Comics. Two of her books – The Pact and Plain Truth — were made into television movies. My Sister's Keeper is currently being filmed at New Line Cinema, with Cameron Diaz in the lead.
Piccoult's most recent book is Change of Heart, published this year. She is currently working on her 16th novel, Handle with Care, to be released in 2009.
