Reviewed by Mary Wolfe, Owner of The Village Bookshop, Bayfield.
“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 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.”
So begins the most recent novel by Jodi Picoult, author of nine previous books, among them, My Sister’s Keeper, Vanishing Acts, and most recently, The Tenth Circle.
If you’ve read a Jodi Picoult novel before, you know what to expect – characters that will touch you, a storyline that will move you, and a book you can’t put down. If Nineteen Minutes is your first Jodi Picoult novel, then this is a great place to start.
Meet Peter Houghton: he has never fit in … right from the first day of kindergarten when he gets his brand new Superman lunchbox thrown out the school bus window … to growing up with an older brother who can do no wrong in his parents’ eyes … to seventeen years later when his most secret desire becomes common knowledge and a big joke among the whole student body … to when he decides to put a stop to his pain.
Meet Josie Cormier: she always felt she was a misfit because other kids had two parents, even if their parents were divorced, but Josie has never even met her dad … and her mom is a busy and powerful professional. As a small child, Josie befriends Peter Houghton because she sees something in him she can relate to … but as she enters High School and is accepted by the “in” crowd, she must leave Peter’s friendship behind, or risk her own social suicide.
Meet Lacy and Lewis Houghton, Peter’s parents: Lacy is a caring and sensitive mid-wife whose loving hands have ushered numerous newborns into the world; Lewis is a college professor of economics who will “go down in history as being the economist who’d conceived a mathematical formula for happiness: R/E, or Reality divided by Expectations.” There are “two ways to be happy: improve your reality, or lower your expectations.”
Meet Alex Cormier, Josie’s mom: Alex has recently become a superior court judge and is extremely good at making difficult decisions. She always felt she had raised the type of daughter any parent would be proud of, but since Josie had entered High School, all that had changed, “and the tunnel of communication between them slowly bricked shut. Alex didn’t necessarily think that Josie was hiding anything more than any other teenager, but it was different: a normal parent might metaphorically judge her child’s friends, whereas Alex could do it legally.”
This novel begins on March 6, 2007, in an ordinary small town in New Hampshire, where nothing ever happens – until “its complacency is shattered by an act of violence.” The issues of our world are tackled head on by the author, who attempts to show an unbelievably horrific situation from several points of view. This book probably asks more questions than it can ever hope to answer: “Can your own child become a mystery to you? What does it mean to be different in our society? Is it ever okay for a victim to strike back? And who – if anyone – has the right to judge someone else?”
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Nineteen Minutes