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"Nineteen Minutes" by Jody Picoult and school shoo

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Ophelia

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"Nineteen Minutes" by Jody Picoult and school shoo

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"Nineteen Minutes" by Jody Picoult and school shootings.

I am transferring what I have already written about this book to this post.

Yesterday I finished "Nineteen Minutes", which was a bestseller a while ago and probably everybody has read except me. I sympathized with the killer, which is what the author wanted me to do, as I understood. I was feeling very sad at the end. I suppose that after all the school shootings in the US all those books are hackneyed but it happens that I have only read two of them.
Also, and although I've never witnessed bullying, I'm very aware of lines of power, the strong and the weak in schools because I am very much afraid that this is both a reflection of (albeit an exaggerated one) and an excellent preparation for society-- in the world of adults things are mostly smoother, the power-holders have become cleverer about getting what they want. What I'm saying is that some of the hallway and playground bad behaviour stays there, and some of it is taken away to the real world, and I feel powerless and saddened about the whole thing.


What did people think of Picoult's characterization? It got a lot of praize in readers' reviews. Most characters were believable, but what did you think of Matt?


Oh, and another question: I have read somewhere that school shootings in the US only make it to the news when they take place in a mostly-white suburban middle-class area but go unreported when they happen in a poor , mostly non-white inner-city school, thus perhaps giving a distorted overall impression.
I've heard another version of this: the media only report the mass school shootings in the middle class areas because this is where they have all happened (in other schools it would be one or two people hurt or killed in a fight), but not planned massed killing?

Do you have an answer?

(Later)

I've tried to answer my own questions.
Newspaper articles I've read were not trying to give an overall picture (which is their right), so they haven't helped much.

Wiki has this paragraph that I find useful:
In the United States, one-on-one public-school violence, such as beatings and stabbings or violence related to gang activity, is more common in some densely populated areas (which tend to be impoverished sections of cities). Inner-city or urban schools were much more likely than other schools to report serious violent crimes, with 17 percent of city principals reporting at least one serious crime compared to 11 percent of urban schools, 10 percent of rural schools, and five percent of suburban town schools in the 1997 school year. Student-perpetrated school shootings in North America have mostly been in overwhelmingly white, middle-class, non-urban areas.
An article in the New York Times about Hoover High School in San Diego seems to confirm this:
''I heard on the news that violence is more likely to happen in a school like ours,'' Ms. Nelson said. ''I don't agree with that. What happened in Santee or Columbine won't happen here. We don't want to sabotage ourselves. And we've got enough to worry about in our lives already.''
(...)
Of course, no school or workplace or city street is immune from a disturbed soul bent on destruction. But at Hoover High School, where the student body is 54 percent Latino, 20 percent black, 18 percent Asian and 5 percent white, the consensus is strong that the type of mass school shootings that have happened in suburbia in the past several years could not happen in a school where students grow up knowing the horrors of crime and violence.

The school is located on a major thoroughfare of City Heights, a working-class neighborhood undergoing revitalization but still struggling with its reputation as the place where San Diego's drug dealers, prostitutes and gangs roam the streets. Students here describe dodging gangs, bullets, drug dealers, junkies and police officers who stop them for no reason.
Ophelia.
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bohemian_girl
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I really liked Nineteen Minutes.

That's interesting, what you said about the media possibly reporting on premeditated crimes in middle class areas. Personally I think that if that kind of shooting happened in any school it would make headlines everywhere because it's so shocking. As for crimes on a smaller scale, I honestly can't say. We can only guess based on what we see and we may or may not be seeing all of it.

I certainly sympathised with the killer, as we were positioned to do so. I have heard stories come out of such shootings where it has been revealed that the killer was bullied... but often in their rage they have shot people who weren't the bullies, which still makes them seem cold hearted. Like when the special needs girl was killed. No matter what he had been through, there is no justification for that. I also thought that it was interesting to explore the grief felt by the killer's mother over what had happened. She too had lost a child and her voice is a voice that most people wouldn't even consider so it was good to get inside her head as well.

As for Matt... I thought he was a real... I don't know what kind of language I should use here but let's just say a nasty piece of work. I didn't see the twist coming. He was a very different character than I'm used to reading about. In fact I have never (to my knowledge) met anyone like that. He shocked me, that's for sure. I can't say I had a lot of sympathy for him in the end.

This also reminds me of a book that I haven't read yet but am planning to called We Need to Talk About Kevin. On the topic of school shooting fictions I have also read Rage by Stephen King, which went out of publication around the time that these massacres started happening. It was pretty good but we only see things from the killer's perspective. An advantage of Nineteen Minutes, and any book by Jodi Picoult, is that we get to explore events from the perspective of different characters and it adds to the depth of the story.
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I really think you are going to like We need to talk about Kevin.
I think it's one of the first books I wrote about when I joined Booktalk, I wanted to discuss it with other people but there were no takers! :smile:
Ophelia.
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bohemian_girl
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I've heard that it's very good. I now have my copy from the library and will hopfully get stuck into it soon :P
Leeann1980
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I finished reading 19 minutes a few months ago, it was the first of Jodi Picoult's books that I had read and I found that I could not stop thinking about it. The book raises many issues and is not easy reading, as a mother of a four year old the parts of the book where Peter's mother wonders whether it was her parenting and her way of dealing with Peter's being bullied that led to the shooting happening particularly poignant. Bullying is something that as parents we all worry about and there are no easy answers or solutions, all we can do is try our best. The character of Matt was very unpleasant and hard to like, but then we did not learn any details of his home life, why was he so aggressive?
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Leeann1980 wrote:The book raises many issues and is not easy reading, as a mother of a four year old the parts of the book where Peter's mother wonders whether it was her parenting and her way of dealing with Peter's being bullied that led to the shooting happening particularly poignant.
Leeann, I found that interesting as well, although I am not a mother myself. And I agree with you. We didn't know all that much about Matt's home life and what perhaps made him the way that he was.

We Need to Talk About Kevin, is about a mother of a boy who grows up to be responsible for a massacre and through a series of letters that she writes, she wonders whether how things turned out were the result of her actions (she was indifferent towards having a child) and the way that she raised him, or whether he was simply born evil. It's a very powerful book and if you're interested in those matters I highly recommend it. I did find it a bit disturbing though, and I probably would have found it more so if I had kids of my own, so I'll just warn you there. But it is an amazing book and it will stay with me for a long time.
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Thank you :smile: , I have heard a lot about this book but I have had no luck at my local library so far, I think a trip to the book shop is in order!!!
Leeann1980
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Have just ordered 'We need to talk about Kevin', should arrive in the next few days, I will let you know my thoughts when I have read it.... :up:
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bohemian_girl
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Awesome! I hope that you enjoy it. I love the way that Lionel Shriver writes. I have been reading some more of her books and am in love with her writing style. We Need To Talk About Kevin is still my favourite though :smile:
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