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:
An article in the New York Times about Hoover High School in San Diego seems to confirm this: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.
''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.