Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult: Not one of her better books. There are a few things you can count on in your average Picoult novel: a family or two with teenage children, police and/or lawyers, at least one romance, and a heaping helping of dysfunction. I get the impression that Picoult reads a headline and decides to write a story about it. Which is fine, but this book’s Weighty Topic is school shootings, which reads a lot like a cross between We Need to Talk About Kevin and a Law & Order episode, with a generous sprinkling of high school stereotypes. The main characters were the shooter and his mother, the shooter’s crush and her mother (a judge) and boyfriend (a bully/jock), and the detective. The whole story was just so tragic that I stopped caring how things turned out. It didn’t help that I called the twist ending around halfway through the book. I’ve read some excellent books by Picoult; this just didn’t happen to be one of them.

Also posted on BookCrossing.