Nineteen Minutes
By
Jodi Picoult
Created for
Leisa Bailey
By
Book Club Classics
March 10, 2009
1
Table of Contents – Nineteen Minutes
2
 Introduction
3
 Questions
4
 Positive Reviews
10
 Negative Reviews
11
 What to Read Next
12
Dear Leisa,
Thank you so much for ordering the Nineteen Minutes book club discussion
questions from www.BookClubClassics.com. I sincerely hope this adds to your
group’s enjoyment of the novel.
Please feel free to email any questions or concerns before your club meets or any
feedback afterwards: (kgalles@msn.com or BookClubClassics@q.com). I promise
that any suggestions will be used to strengthen future questions, and I would love
to use any positive quotes on my web site.
Again, thank you for your support and feel free to order more questions in the
future!!
Sincerely,
Kristen Galles
Book Club Classics
3
Nineteen Minutes – Discussion Questions
The following questions approach the novel from a number of different angles -- including how
the novel functions as a work of art, how it addresses fundamental questions of humanity, and
how it engages the reader.
A good discussion tends to start with our “heads” and end with our “hearts.” Therefore, you
may want to save subjective opinions of taste until after you have discussed the more objective
elements of this work. It is tempting to begin with, “What did everyone think?” But if a number
of people really didn’t like the novel, their opinions may derail a discussion of the novel’s merits.
On the other hand, I recommend starting with a few accessible questions and asking every
member to respond to ensure that all voices are present and heard from the beginning. Just a
few suggestions. Most importantly: Enjoy…!
Warm up questions:
 Has anyone read Picoult’s other novels? How did this novel compare?
 In this novel, which character do you feel you got to know the best?
 Which character do you feel you got to know the least?
Check out the following cover images. Which seem most appropriate for this novel? Which
seem least appropriate (and why)?
How affected are you by the cover of a novel? What was the effect of your particular cover
image on your impressions of this novel?
4
1) At end of her acknowledgements, Picoult writes: “And finally, to the thousands of kids
out there who are a little bit different, a little bit scared, a little bit unpopular: this
one’s for you.”
Do you think the kids she identifies (different, scared, unpopular) would relate to this
book? Would you recommend this novel to an “unpopular” kid? Would you
recommend it to a “popular” kid?
2) Reread the quote at start of Part One: “If we don’t change the direction we are headed,
we will end up where we are going.” – Chinese proverb
Which character is Picoult speaking to here? Part of McAfee’s defense and Dr. Wah’s
testimony involves the scientific evidence that adolescents are not cognitively able to
make sound decisions. In light of this, who is the quote most likely meant to describe?
3) At the beginning of the chapters, Picoult includes excerpts of a letter we assume was
written by Peter. Notice what he writes at the very beginning:
“I guess I should tell you, Don’t blame yourself; this isn’t your fault, but that would be
a lie. We both know that I didn’t get here by myself.”
If this is true, who should we hold most to blame for Peter’s actions?
4) What is the effect of beginning the novel with the prosecutor’s opening remarks (a list
of things we do, every day, that take only 19 minutes)? Why does Diana Leven begin
her case with this list? Why does Picoult begin her novel with the same list?
5) Notice the shifting perspective of the first chapter – we start (unknowingly) with Leven’s
opening statements -- then shift to Alex trying to balance her roles as mother and judge
-- then go to Josie’s loneliness and desperation to fit in -- then examine Patrick’s fear
that he will always be too late to save someone – then listen to Lacy’s ruminations on
how infants are “8 pounds of possibility” – then witness Peter’s tears and Josie’s
struggles with hypocrisy – before we get to the school and hear about Zoe’s
orthodontist appointment – and then Patrick apprehends Peter after the shooting.
What is the effect of juxtaposing so many perspectives? Why do you think Picoult
chooses to create our first impression in this manner? Did the novel grab your interest
immediately? Were your first impressions positive?
5
6) Notice our first impression of Josie through her mother’s eyes:
“A pretty, popular, straight-A student who knew better than most the consequences of falling
off the straight-and-narrow. A girl who was destined for great things. A young woman who
was exactly what Alex had hoped her daughter would grow to become.” (6)
Notice that later on the same page that Josie is studying “catalysts – substances that
speed up a reaction, but stayed unchanged by it.” (6-7)
Then, two pages later, we receive our first impression of Josie according to Josie herself:
“Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a
sumptuous room, sure – a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm
to enter – but it was a room from which there really wasn’t an escape. Either Josie was
someone she didn’t want to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted.” (8) “…When the
truth came out, and no one wanted to around her anymore, it stood to reason Josie wouldn’t
want to be around herself either.” (10)
Were you surprised by Josie’s stash of sleeping pills and thoughts of suicide?
Remember, this scene occurs the morning of the shooting. What “truth” is Josie afraid
might come out? Is Josie a sympathetic character? Did you empathize with her
throughout the novel? Why might she be vulnerable to a relationship with a boy like
Matt Royston?
7) Notice that Alex and Josie struggle with the same conflict -- their identity as others see
them vs. who they truly believe they are:
“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 behind it?” (83)
How else are they similar?
8) Our first impression of Peter involves his mother delivering a baby – then of Peter
waking up – then of Peter crying. We soon learn that Peter’s dad is a professor of the
economics of happiness. Beyond the obvious irony of their professions, why does
Picoult choose to make Lewis and Lacy so easy to like?
9) Lewis is known for his theories of happiness, represented by the following equation: R/E
(reality divided by expectations) = happiness. Lewis believes that in order to achieve
happiness, we need to either improve our reality or lower our expectations. Which part
of this equation did Peter fail?
6
10) Although Lacy thinks everyone is the same at their core (32), Picoult sets up Lacy and
Alex as foils (contrasting characters). Both believe they have “failed” their children. Do
you agree with them? Who do you believe was the better mother?
11) Recall Peter’s kindergarten teacher view of children:
“…the fact is, some kids are simply magnets for teasing. Other children see a weakness, and
they exploit it… [Peter’s weakness is that] he’s sensitive, and he’s sweet.” (72).
Lacy’s response is to ground Peter if he doesn’t stick up for himself. In this scenario,
who do you hold most responsible for Peter’s continued bullying?
12) What were your impressions of Peter’s brother Joey? Is his cruelty further evidence of
Lacy and Lewis’s bad parenting?
13) Notice how Peter reacts to the schoolmate who gets her period in class. Is Picoult’s
intention to indicate that all kids will be cruel, given the chance? Do you agree with
this?
14) Both of Peter’s parents struggle with the following:
“Whether or not you believe in fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when
something goes wrong. Do you think it’s your fault – that if you’d tried better, or worked
harder, it wouldn’t have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?” (91)
Which, if either, parent do you hold most responsible for Peter’s actions?
15) “’Everyone, Lacy thought, is somebody’s son.”’ It came down to this, Lacy realized: You stared
at the stranger in front of you and decided, categorically, that this was no longer your son. Or
you made the decision to find whatever scraps of your child you still could in what he had
become… Was that even really a choice, if you were a mother? “(124-5).
Later she asks: “Could you hate your son for what he had done, and still love him for who he
had been?” (248)
How would you answer Lacy’s questions? Is it parents’ responsibility to unconditionally
love their children, despite their actions?
7
16) When Jordan McAfee first meets Peter, he wonders,
“Did every teenager have the capacity to fall on one side or the other of that tightrope, and
could you identify a single moment that tipped it off balance?” (136)
How would you answer Jordan’s question?
17) During the community’s grief session, Peter is described as “a monster” – is this a valid
description? (167) Some critics believe that Picoult allows Peter to be too sympathetic.
Did you find Peter a sympathetic character? Did this disturb you? Does it seem realistic
(if not unsettling) that a murderer could be sympathetic?
18) On the other side, notice how many of Peter’s victims are unsympathetic characters:
[Josie:] “…Just because you don’t want to hang out with losers doesn’t mean you have to
torture them, does it?” “Yeah, it does,” Matt said. “Because if there isn’t a them, there can’t
be an us.” His eyes narrowed. “You should know that better than anyone.” (219)
What was the effect of having many of the victims unsympathetic?
19) How did you react to McAfee’s Post Traumatic Syndrome / battered woman defense?
Could this defense have kept Josie out of jail?
20) Were you surprised that Peter intentionally missed his chance at killing a deer and was
sickened when his father shot it? Should Jordan have used this in his defense? Do you
hold Jordan and Lacy responsible for Peter’s access to guns?
21) During the trial, Lacy muses:
“Josie may not have initiated the teasing that Peter suffered over his middle and high school
years, but she didn’t intervene either, and in Lacy’s book, that had made her equally
responsible.” (385)
Do you agree with Lacy’s accusation?
22) At the end, Josie tells her mother:
“The rest of us, we’re all like Peter. Some of us just do a better job of hiding it. What’s the
difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person
you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you’re faking.” (447)
Do you agree with Josie?
8
23) Did the outcome of Josie’s case seem just?
24) How did you react to the ending? Did Peter’s suicide provide satisfactory closure to the
novel?
25) A number of times throughout the novel, the following reality is presented:
“It was why these schools, post-911, had teachers wearing ID all the time and doors locked
during the day – the enemy was always supposed to be an outsider, not the kid who was
sitting right next to you.” (24)
Who IS the enemy? Can schools prevent violence from occurring?
26) When Alex was vetted for her judicial position, she responded: “Morally, no one has the
right to judge anyone else. But legally, it’s not a right – it’s a responsibility.” (80)
Do you agree with both sides of her statement? Do we have the right to judge others
morally? Why/not? Do we have the responsibility to judge others legally? What if the
law is morally unjust?
27) School shootings are the result of many complex factors, both societal and personal.
After reading Nineteen Minutes, which factors do think Picoult emphasized? Did your
impressions of why school shootings happen alter as a result of reading this novel?
28) Here is one reviewer’s take on the novel:
Nearly 8 years [after Columbine], the topic [of school violence] still feels raw and the use of it
for so-called entertainment, exploitive.
But despite the subject matter, you won't put down Jodi Picoult's newest novel, Nineteen
Minutes. And, amazingly, you won't feel exploited, either.
Here’s another reviewer’s take:
Simply tearing her story from the headlines isn't enough. She loves shocking endings and
keep-you-guessing plot twists. Here, those devices feel manipulative. After all, we're talking
about a massacre, not Nancy Drew and the case of the missing locket.
Did you feel exploited or manipulated by this novel? Did the ending seem appropriate?
Did the ending provide satisfying closure?
9
29) Frequently, Picoult is criticized for having sensationalized endings. Frances Taliaferro for
the Washington Post remarked:
…If you are a person of a certain age, you will remember how made-for-television movies (the
network kind) used to popularize diseases such as anorexia, crimes such as domestic violence
and incest, and all manner of ethical dilemmas. Films of this ilk now survive mainly on
LIFETIME, but the need for catharsis --- to dramatize, relive and try to make sense of a
shocking and tragic event --- is still very much with us, and that's where Picoult comes in. She
takes the most difficult, ambiguous questions --- Is it ever right to kidnap your own child?
Does a kid have to donate body parts to her grievously ill sister? When a dying spouse asks
you to kill her, should you do it? --- and animates them with a wonderful cast of characters,
almost always flawed, attractive, small-town folks who are struggling to do the right thing…
Why do you think Picoult is so popular in America?
30) Another reviewer, Kathy Weissman, noted the following :
The book has already stirred controversy in Hanover, N.H., where Picoult now lives and where
high school officials pulled the book from a reading list over concerns that Hanover and its
high school were too similar to the fictional settings in the book. (Hanover High School had
been given advance copies of the novel.) Picoult, who researched Columbine and other school
shootings for the book, has said any similarities were coincidental.
In some ways, unfortunately, any high school can catch a glimmer of itself in the book.
Do you agree with the decision of Hanover High officials pulled it from its reading list?
Why/not? Do you agree that any high school can find similarities to Sterling High?
10
Nineteen Minutes – Positive Reviews
Rocky Mountain News – Jennie A. Camp
Most Coloradoans who lived through the horrific Columbine High School massacre and its
aftermath aren't likely to rejoice at the idea of a novel based on a school shooting. Nearly 8
years later, the topic still feels raw and the use of it for so-called entertainment, exploitive.
But despite the subject matter, you won't put down Jodi Picoult's newest novel, Nineteen
Minutes. And, amazingly, you won't feel exploited, either.
The shooting occurs in the first 30 pages of Picoult's novel, and what follows is not a "making of
a killer"-type book that revisits Peter's childhood and the bullying he endured to uncover why
such an event has happened. Although Picoult does, indeed, explore bullying, she instead
retells the fateful 19 minutes - or at least slices of those 19 minutes - again and again from the
perspectives of various characters.
When we first read of the shooting, it seems painfully clear who the victims and killer are. But
as the novel unfolds, Picoult succeeds in lifting those assumptions up for scrutiny, until villains
and victims seem to blend into a motley jumble of alliances and rejection.
Peter himself is a curious mix of an innocent kindergartener whose lunch box is rudely tossed
out of the school bus window and a merciless killer who stops in the midst of his shooting spree
to calmly eat a bowl of Rice Krispies in the school cafeteria.
Impressively, Picoult doesn't make anything about Nineteen Minutes neat or easy or
comfortable. Part of what makes the novel so difficult to set down, besides Picoult's smooth
prose and driving narrative pace, is that so many of the characters' emotional battles strike
unquestionably close to home. It's difficult to imagine how wide and how deep the
reverberations of such tragedies reach, but Picoult is not afraid to leap into the depths and
explore the humanness of what can lead to such unchecked anger and vengeance.
Link to full review:
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/books/article/0,2792,DRMN_63_5387747,00.html
11
Nahal Toosi for Associated Press
The ingredients swirling in Jodi Picoult's new novel will be familiar to anyone who has attended
high school. Cliques, nerds, prima donnas, social climbers, bullies, victims and clueless, but wellmeaning parents.
In other words, purgatory.
In “Nineteen Minutes,” Picoult deftly layers and combines all the elements to relay the fictional
tale of a shooting massacre at a high school. The before, the during and the after is all there,
and it's not pretty.
Even though such shootings, most notably that of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., are
now part of the public psyche, Picoult manages to go beyond the cold, sterile statistics that are
intoned today when retelling those events. Her book reminds us of the heartbreak and the loss
of innocence. It's also breathtaking storytelling by a best-selling writer.
The setting of “Nineteen Minutes” is Sterling, N.H., a wealthy, boring town that's stunned one
day when social outcast Peter Houghton kills 10 people at his high school.
Legally, Peter's guilt is never really in doubt. As the tale unfolds, however, it's tough to tell
where to put the blame. Peter didn't just occasionally deal with teasing. He faced relentless
bullying by students considered kings and queens. He could not win and, growing up in the
shadow of a popular older brother, it had long seemed he never would.
Link to full review:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20070316/news_1c16book.html
12
Nineteen Minutes – Negative Reviews
Jocelyn McClurg for USA Today
Picoult, who also wrote My Sister's Keeper, is the quintessential middlebrow novelist. Middle
America is her canvas, and here she paints a troubling portrait of families and kids, especially
the bullies and the bullied…
Simply tearing her story from the headlines isn't enough. She loves shocking endings and keepyou-guessing plot twists. Here, those devices feel manipulative. After all, we're talking about a
massacre, not Nancy Drew and the case of the missing locket.
Even though her prose rarely rises above serviceable, Picoult knows how to hook you. The key
to Nineteen Minutes seems to reside with Josie Cormier, who is found unconscious but
unharmed in the locker room with Peter. Beside her is the body of her boyfriend, jock Matt
Royston. She claims not to remember what happened.
Picoult gets inside the heads of adolescents, and Josie's is a mess. She's angry with her single
mother, Alex, who is the judge who is scheduled to try Peter's case. And there's the
uncomfortable fact that she was Peter's best friend when she was a little girl.
Nineteen Minutes may not plumb great psychological depths or scale literary heights. It pales
next to Lionel Shriver's fascinatingly creepy bad-seed novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin.
Link to full review:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2007-03-05-picoult-nineteen-minutes_N.htm
13
Maryan Pelland for Popmatters.com:
Nineteen minutes is enough time to become disenchanted with an author. Sometimes, it
doesn’t even take the reading of an entire book, though I made it all the way through Jodi
Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes.
When I’m engrossed in a novel and author-error yanks me out, I feel cheated. It’s like watching
an historical film, like Last of the Mohicans, and discovering a jet comtrail marring the ancient
prairie sky. But we’re all human. I usually shrug and read on.
However, it’s impossible to get past a laundry list of troubles with Picoult’s 14th destined-forstardom novel. Clearly, Picoult knows how to write. She sells books. She sells graphic novels, to
wit—five Wonder Woman comics issues. She’s been writing a long time, postulating aloud in
magazines recently about how difficult it is to churn out best sellers while remaining true to
your own principals.
Her Nineteen Minutes has a sensationalized plot. A question: Should movie makers and book
writers profit from national tragedies like school shootings 911? Picoult’s novel draws upon
both. And I guess the answer is—sure, it’s free enterprise. In droves, we buy the books and see
the movies. You can’t keep us away.
But this book is disturbing. What should be a ghastly tragedy, a high school boy coldly walking
into his school building one morning and graphically blasting away at teachers and students,
comes wrapped in a tawdry chick-lit romance between female judge and crime investigator…
…Most difficult to understand is the trick ending. Without spoilers, I’ll say only that Josie does
something that simply cannot be believed in her character’s context. A cardinal rule of writing
fiction is, you can create a world and make it anything you want; but the story must happen
only within the physics of that world. In other words, you can only write what is believable,
given the set up. Picoult broke that rule, then called a Greek chorus to explain and employed a
“God machine” for a “surprise” ending that forces its own logic right down our gullets.
Link to full review: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/nineteen-minutes-by-jodipicoult/
14
Recommended Reading
A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number
of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far.
A gifted journalist as well as the author of seven novels, she brings to her story a keen understanding of
the intricacies of marital and parental relationships as well as a narrative pace that is both compelling
and thoughtful.
Eva Khatchadourian is a smart, skeptical New Yorker whose impulsive marriage to Franklin, a much more
conventional person, bears fruit, to her surprise and confessed disquiet, in baby Kevin. From the start
Eva is ambivalent about him, never sure if she really wanted a child, and he is balefully hostile toward
her; only good-old-boy Franklin, hoping for the best, manages to overlook his son's faults as he grows
older, a largely silent, cynical, often malevolent child. The later birth of a sister who is his opposite in
every way, deeply affectionate and fragile, does nothing to help, and Eva always suspects his role in an
accident that befalls little Celia.
The narrative, which leads with quickening and horrifying inevitability to the moment when Kevin
massacres seven of his schoolmates and a teacher at his upstate New York high school, is told as a series
of letters from Eva to an apparently estranged Franklin, after Kevin has been put in a prison for juvenile
offenders. This seems a gimmicky way to tell the story, but is in fact surprisingly effective in its picture of
an affectionate couple who are poles apart, and enables Shriver to pull off a huge and crushing shock far
into her tale. It's a harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel, with a
clear-eyed, hard-won ending and a tough-minded sense of the difficult, often painful human enterprise.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Publishers Weekly
15