Another Book Review - NINETEEN MINUTES

Jan. 16th, 2009 at 7:02 PM

Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Piccoult.

Another one by Piccoult. I had already read another book by her: My sister's Keeper. From these two books I can make the following conclusions about the author: 1) she likes to write about lawyers 2) she likes to bring up/question morality and 3) she likes to mislead you throughout the whole book and incorporates a surprise ending.
At first I thought the book was extremely predictable after Peter had been arrested for shooting all those people at the school. Kids sent to hospitals, lives changed forever, grief of parents, detectives and lawyers trying to figure things out, blah blah blah. And I thought the way the author kept switching time periods, going back and forth from the day of shooting to 6 years before, to a week after the shooting, to 2 days prior to the shooting, etc. It was really annoying. But it's one of those things that you get used to. As for predictability, it got interesting as the book wore on. Due to the flashbacks and fast forwards, much more is revealed about the history and secrets of the characters...needless to say it wasn't as predictable anymore. The ending was a big blow. A shocker, much like that of My Sister's Keeper, although not as drastic or emotional, in my opinion.
I don't think that I like Josie as much as the reader was intended to. And I thought the idea of all the different cliques in Sterling High School was a bit strange too. I know of schools in the country that are like that, I'm a grateful that mine is not consisted of posses (we don't even use that word in our school) that just stick together like that. I like how our school has cliques, but there's different groups within those cliques, and mostly everyone is friendly or aqcuittal with other people outside of their respective groups. I remember feeling this when I watched the movie "Mean Girls" a couple years ago, and was surprised at the idea of "the plastics". Where Magruder has people kind of like that, they don't act as obnoxious and elite as those in Sterling High. I guess that's some of the benefits of living in a suburban/urban area. Peter would have liked it here. Bullying to that extent is pretty rare. We have consciences. I can't really imagine schools in other parts of the country being like that though, although I know many of them exist. If you ahven't already read the book, I should say that the ending is rather shocking, but when you look back on al the hints in the flashbacks and stuff you can see that it's not really all that surprising. I found the lawyers to be pretty amusing and at first the backgrounds and histories of all the characters was annoying because I just wanted to get on the with the story, but I guess it somehow correlates with all the emotions of the book. Overall, I liked it. It was enterrtaining, and it shed light on certain subjectst/areas that I think should be mentioned and broadened. There you have it :)