Nineteen Minutes

Author：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....In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it. In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge.

　　Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens -- until the day its complacency is shattered by a shocking act of violence. In the aftermath, the town’s residents must not only seek justice in order to begin healing but also come to terms with the role they played in the tragedy. For them, the lines between truth and fiction, right and wrong, insider and outsider have been obscured forever. Josie Cormier, the teenage daughter of the judge sitting on the case, could be the state’s best witness, but she can’t remember what happened in front of her own eyes. And as the trial progresses, fault lines between the high school and the adult community begin to show, destroying the closest of friendships and families.

　　Nineteen Minutes is New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult’s most raw, honest, and important novel yet. Told with the straightforward style for which she has become known, it asks simple questions that have no easy answers: Can your own child become a mystery to you? What does it mean to be different in our society? Is it ever okay for a victim to strike back? And who -- if anyone -- has the right to judge someone else?

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[Reading Log] 

‧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?

 ‧Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think its 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? 

‧We live in a country where American lids are dying because we’re sending them overseas to kill people for oil. But when one sad, distraught child who doesn’t see the beauty in life goes and wrongly acts on his rage by shooting up a school, people starts pointing a finger at heavy metal music. 

‧When you died, you did not get to come back and see what you were missing. You didn’t get to apologize. You didn’t get a second chance. 

‧Everyone talks like it’s all right to be different, but America’s supposed to be this melting pot, and what the hell does that mean? If it’s a melting pot, then you’re really just trying to make everyone the same, aren’t you? 

‧Everyone’s saying I ruined their lives, but no one seemed to care when my life was the one being ruined. 

‧Life was what happened when all the what-if’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or – in this case—feared might come to pass passed by instead. 

‧Teens are always trying to fit in. If you don’t fit into the popular crowd, you try the athletic crowd. If that doesn’t work, you go to the drama crowd…or to the druggies. 

‧sorry doesn’t change anything, it does for the person who’s apologizing. 

‧you can say it million times, but that doesn’t make it any more true. 

‧One of her sons had been doing drugs. The other was a murderer. Had she and Lewis been the wrong parents for the boys they’d had? Or should they never have been parents at all? 

‧Children didn’t make their own mistakes. They plunged into the pits they’d been led to by their parents. 

‧Ask a random lid today if she wants to be popular and she’ll tell you no, even if the truth is that if she was ina desert dying of thirst and had the choice between a glass of water and instant popularity, she’d probably choose the later. 

‧Adolescence is about fitting in, not standing out. 

‧If  you’re a parent, part of your job is letting them grow up. 

‧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 bee invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you’re faking.