Loved Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes. Judging from the novel's thickness and its font size, I thought I would need to renew the library loan. It turned out I finished the book in about a week.

Unlike her other novels, she did not use different characters' point of views in different chapters. The story was told in third person point of view, with some 'thoughts' of the main characters highlighted at the beginning of some chapters. It's in no way made the story any less gripping.

The main story: a 17-year-old boy was a victim of bullying since his first day of kindergarten. He grew up learning that nobody would ever able to offer protections. Reporting or fighting it back would result in punishments or more bullying. One fine day he decided to bring guns to his high school; he's then charged with 10 first degree murders and 19 attempted murders.

It's interesting how the story was unraveled from the angle of the popular kids - how they fought so hard to be in the popular group although it might mean being someone they're not. Adopted by adults and kids alike, persona is the main topic.



If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask... with nothing beneath it?

* * *

If you gave 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?

* * *

You can feel people staring; it's like heat that rises from the pavement during summer, like a poker in the small of your back. You don't have to hear a whisper, either, to know that it's about you.
I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn't tell.  I mean, I was just me.
Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did.
That was the day I started to believe they might be right.

* * *

I think a person's life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the director's cut - the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way.
There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you've survived, or the minutes you've been stuck there. 
Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over.

(Nineteen Minutes - Jodi Picoult)