Nineteen Minutes
by Jodi Picoult
In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five.
Nineteen minutes is how long it took the Tennessee Titans to sell out of tickets to the play-offs. It’s the length of a sitcom, minus the commercials. It’s the driving distance from the Vermont border to the town of Sterling, New Hampshire.
In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed. You can walk a mile. You can sew a hem.
In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it.
In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge.
Nineteen Minutes is a young adult novel about a school shooting, the events leading up to it, and its aftermath. The author, Jodi Picoult, researched actual school shootings for background and while details in her story reflect shootings we’re familiar with, the setting and story of Nineteen Minutes is entirely fictional. In a small New Hampshire town, Peter, a high school boy who has been mercilessly bullied by classmates from kindergarten to the present day, detonates a pipe bomb in the school parking lot, enters the building armed with handguns and shotguns, and over the course of nineteen minutes kills ten (nine students and one teacher) and wounds several others. He’s stopped mid-attack and taken into custody by a police detective responding to panicked calls from the school. The novel follows a few main characters: Peter himself, his childhood friend Josie, Peter and Josie’s mothers, Peter’s lawyer, and Patrick (the police detective who responded to the shooting and arrested Peter).
As a novel, it works. The characters are well-developed and believable; the story, with all its surprises and twists, ditto. Although Jodi Picoult wrote it with a young adult audience in mind, this senior citizen gave it four stars on a five-star scale and strongly commends it to fellow adult readers, particularly parents and teachers. More importantly, though, I commend it to middle- and high-school readers, because it touches on subjects of deep and ever-present concern to them: sex, sexuality, date rape and sexual abuse, abortion, drugs, violence, popularity, isolation, grief and loss, suicide.
Since its publication in 2007, more than 12 million copies of Nineteen Minutes have been sold. It’s popular with young adult readers and has been incorporated into the curricula of high schools around the nation. Naturally, a book this popular, addressing the subjects that it does, has attracted the attention of book-banners.
In 2022, a school district in Utah banned it from libraries and classrooms as part of a sweep against books with LBGTQ+ characters and/or themes, and which appeared to violate a new state law regulating “sensitive materials” in schools. Soon afterward, the Katy School District in Texas banned it on the basis that it was “adopting, supporting, or promoting gender fluidity” (despite the novel’s total lack of transgender or asexual characters or any mention of gender fluidity). Other bans, by then, had begun to occur so frequently that in its 2024 report on school book bannings for the previous academic year, PEN America listed Nineteen Minutes as the most commonly banned book title in the U.S.A., with 98 total bans.
In response to PEN America’s report, Jodi Picoult said this:
“Having the most banned book in the country is not a badge of honor — it’s a call for alarm. Nineteen Minutes is banned not because it’s about a school shooting, but the because of a single page that depicts a date rape and uses anatomically correct words for the human body. It is not gratuitous or salacious, and it is not — as the book banners claim — porn. In fact, hundreds of kids have told me that reading Nineteen Minutes stopped them from committing a school shooting, or showed them they were not alone in feeling isolated. My book, and the ten thousand others that have been pulled off school library shelves this year, give kids a tool to deal with an increasingly divided and difficult world. These book banners aren’t helping children. They are harming them.”
As I often do when reviewing and researching banned books, I visited BookLooks.org, a repository of “resource material for content-based information regarding books accessible to children and young adults.” BookLooks is where book-banners get the attention-grabbing but out-of-context quotes and passages they love to loudly recite at school board meetings, without taking the effort of reading the books themselves.
BookLooks rates Nineteen Minutes at 4 on a 0- to 5-point scale (0 being “for everyone”; 5 being “aberrant content”; 4 being “no minors,” which it defines as anyone under 18) and leads off with a summary of concerns: “This book contains sexual activities; sexual nudity; profanity and derogatory terms; violence; controversial social and political commentary; controversial religious commentary; alternate sexualities; hate; abortion; and suicide commentary.”
What follows is an eleven-page selection of quoted sentences and passages from the novel. Not surprisingly, the date-rape scene Jodi Picoult mentioned in her statement on the book’s banning is quoted in its entirety. It is not, as she correctly states, porn … but it is graphic. Other quoted passages deal with additional subjects outlined in BookLook’s summary of concerns.
Surprisingly, though, the quoted passages included these, indexed by page number:
Apparently acknowledging that some high school students sell or take drugs is enough to get a book banned. Or saying the word “rape,” devoid of context or description … or, for all I know, it could have been the words “hit,” “take,” and “kill.” No one under the age of 18 should be exposed to those words! And that last excerpt? Didn’t Pat Boone say the same thing in ‘Twixt Twelve and Twenty, his 1958 advice book for teenagers … or did I hear Elmo say it on Sesame Street?
Methinks book-banners are more concerned with taboo words than they are with taboo thoughts and deeds, or maybe they believe mere exposure to taboo words will lead to taboo behavior. Speaking of taboo words, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include BookLook’s last thought on Nineteen Minutes, which pretty much confirms my suspicion book-banners have a dirty-word fetish:
Well, here’s to Jodi Picoult and her novel Nineteen Minutes, and long may it remain popular with middle- and high-school readers!
References:
Well, at least “fuck” was the most used word. My experience is that it pretty much is the most used word in age groups over 12, and it might be true now for younger ones.