Nineteen Minutes

by Jodi Piccoult

After reading rave reviews for Nineteen Minutes in Entertainment Weekly, Publisher's Weekly, LJ and People magazine, I was really looking forward to this one. Ever since The Pact came out a few years ago, I considered Jodi Piccoult to be one of my favorite authors -- until The Tenth Circle last year; I hated that one. Nineteen Minutes is a little better but just SOOO LONG - over 450 pages! I like long books if they are interesting but this one just didn't hold my attention; I kept thinking about all the other good books I could be reading instead. It starts out okay and it has an interesting plot, however the pace is a little slow and some things just did not make sense to me. The author almost seemed to be saying that a school shooting was justified in some ways because the shooter had been teased for years by the popular kids; I just could not feel that bad for him after what he did. There's twist at the end, of course, but it felt false and completely unbelievable to me. Kind of disappointing.