Summary of a Novel 19 Minutes

As kids grow up, they go through several stages to find out who they truly are. Some kids are very social and have many friends, when others are shy and not considered the coolest kids around. Jodi Picoult demonstrates isolation impeccably in her novel Nineteen Minutes by delving beneath the surface of a small town to explore what it means to be different in today’s society. She shows how one can lose a friend, how people make someone feel bad; in order to feel good about themselves, and how isolation can lead to death related situations.

Teenagers and kids in general, as they grow up they tend to change their friends multiple times.

In the novel, Peter Houghton and Josie Cormier are very close friends since their childhood. Josie, unlike Peter, stands up for herself and even Peter sometimes, since he is mostly picked on. One day, when Josie and Peter are young, he decides to show her his father’s shotgun, which he uses to hunt with.

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Alex, Josie’s mothers, catches them, and was furious saying “My daughter has been coming over to your house for how long, and you’ve got guns lying around” (Picoult 81)? The mothers from this day on stop being friends, which leads the kids to stop going to each other’s houses, although they still manage to play at school. Josie did not want to isolate Peter, because they are really good friends.

Another thing that occurs in the novel, is that when a new girl joined Peter and Josie’s class, she is not very noticed.

One day Peter “notice[s] that [she is] sitting in the middle of an ink stain” (Picoult 158). After Peter realizes that this is not an ink stain and the girl has actually got her period, he screams out: “Dolores has her period” (Picoult 158)! And then the whole class joins and starts laughing, including Josie. Peter, for a while, enjoys not being the one made fun of for once, but once they kids start teasing her, Peter decides to put a “stop”(Picoult 159) to it. After this incident, Josie along with the popular kids continue...