by Dee Delaney

Created on: January 02, 2010

Most people must be familiar with Jodi Picoult, a hugely successful American novelist who, with worldwide sales of more than 12 million, is also Britain's best selling female novelist. She is no prize winner or academic, but instead finds fame and fortune by writing to a very successful formula; she chooses society's most controversial moral dilemmas and turns them into popular novels, not all necessarily with a happy ending. The secret of her success is not only the subject choice, but the research that she puts into writing her books, and the authentic background along with extremely well developed central characters keep her many fans begging for more.

'Nineteen Minutes' is her 14th novel, written in 2007. Although the central theme is a high school shooting incident similar to Columbine, themes of bullying and the pressures of being a teenager and conforming to the stereotype are also deeply explored.

Peter Houghton is the seventeen year old school nerd. A bespectacled geek who has been known to speak in Martian all through recess, the reader understands from the beginning of the book that he is just plain weird and completely unable to fit in with his peers. From his first excited day at school he is bullied unmercifully. Constantly teased, having his possessions destroyed, being jostled and mocked, Peter starts to feel that his life is just not worth living. His childhood friend is Josie who, although once just as marginalised as he is, blossoms into a beautiful teenager and finds that her looks allow her to be accepted into the top "Jocks" clique, of hunky football heroes and their slim, blond girlfriends. Although she still has sympathy for Peter, she is too scared to show this in case she loses her hard won popularity, and has now become one of Peter's tormentors - the final betrayal. The pain that Peter feels every day of his life goes unrecognised by his parents and his teachers. The general feeling is that he should toughen up and fight back, and Peter indeed does fight back - but not in the way that anybody could imagine. Getting ready for school one day, Peter sees something on his computer screen that finally sends him over the edge and, taking two pistols and two rifles, he goes into the school fully armed, killing 9 students and a teacher, and injuring many more. The whole incident takes only 19 minutes, but during that time the whole community is destroyed.

The book sets out to analyse in depth the causes and the effects of such a terrible

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