A review by lefttoread
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

4.0

I had been recommended Nineteen Minutes a few times and for me this book was the decider on if I would carry on reading Jodi Picoult’s books as I’ve never thoroughly enjoyed one.
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“Nobody wants to admit this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that’s because it’s all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led to someone else to do another bad thing, and so on. You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone’s ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end. But then again, maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.”
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Nineteen Minutes is about a boy named Peter who has been bullied most of his life, one day Peter can’t take it anymore and he goes to his school and starts to shoot.
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Right from the start you know who the school shooter is but as you go through the book it flicks between past and present, the reader then gets to see what lead Peter to make the decision he made.
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“If you give someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?”
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We then also see the court procedure and that’s when more details start to unfold. The story is a slow burner, which I don’t usually like, but, it worked in this book. It’s massively character driven, which again, I don’t usually like, but, worked in this book! I felt a lot of emotions and I really started to side with Peter!
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Then the end.. we have a PLOT TWIST! I was shocked, I felt tears spring to my eyes and honestly I was so happy and satisfied with that ending.. which I can’t say about a lot of books.