Nineteen Minutes

Nineteen Minutes (2007) by Jodi Picoult. Nineteen minutes is how long it takes Peter, the "hero" of the book, to walk into his high school and shoot 29 of his fellow students. Ten of them die. The book jumps back and forth in time, from the time of Peter's birth to a year after the massacre. It traces the lives of Peter, his mother and father, and of Alex Cormier, a judge, and her daughter Josie, a high school girl who narrowly escapes being one of Peter's victims. Although the subject matter is ripped from the headlines, this book somehow failed to grab my imagination. Grade: B