Which ones apply to Peter and other characters in the book? For resources on school violence and prevention, visit: www. Visit teenadvice.
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Washington Square Press. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions. A daring first novel—both buoyant comedy and devastating satire by the author of Say You're One of Them. The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in history. Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
As a novel that depicts the cruel realities of the high school social world, Nineteen Minutes considers the often huge gulf between appearances and reality. Nearly every character in the novel feels pressured to have an outward appearance of happiness, success, and popularity.
Yet even for the characters who have the most convincing outward appearance, this belies a much darker reality. Nineteen Minutes. Plot Summary. All Themes Victims vs. Perpetrators Vengeance vs. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play. Over the course of the weekend, Patrick had played approximately ten thousand games of Candyland, had given countless piggy-back rides, had his hair done, and — here was his cardinal mistake — allowed Tara to put bright pink nailpolish on his toes, which Patrick had forgotten to remove.
He glanced down at his feet, and curled his toes under. Patrick yanked his dress socks on, slipped into his loafers, and walked out, still holding his tie. One, he counted. Two, three. On cue, laughter spilled out of the locker room, following him down the hallway. In his office, Patrick closed the door and peered at himself in the tiny mirror on the back. His black hair was still damp from his shower; his face was flushed from his run. He shimmied the knot of his tie up his neck, fashioning the noose, and then sat down at his desk.
Being a small-town detective required Patrick to be firing on all cylinders, all the time. It fell into his lap, already broken, every time. But in the night, when Patrick was lying in his bed alone and letting his mind sew a seam across the hem of his life, he did not remember the proven successes — only the potential failures.
In a town the size of Sterling, everyone knew everyone else, and always had. In some ways, this was comforting — like a great big extended family that you sometimes loved and sometimes fell out of favor with. At other times, it haunted Josie. Like right now, when she was standing in the cafeteria line behind Natalie Zlenko, a dyke of the first order who — way back in second grade, when no one was popular or unpopular yet — had invited Josie over to play and had convinced her to pee on the front lawn like a boy.
It was third period, and just like her mother had predicted, she was famished. They paid for their food and walked across the cafeteria. Whenever she came into the caf during third period, Josie felt like a naturalist -- observing different species in their natural, non-academic habitat.
There were the geeks, bent over their textbooks and laughing at math jokes nobody else even wanted to understand. Behind them were the Art Freaks, who smoked cloves on the ropes course behind the school and drew manga comics in the margins of their notes.
There were misfits, too — kids like Natalie and Angela Phlug, friends by default, because nobody else would have them. They took over two tables during third period, not because there were so many of them, but because they were larger than life.
They were that interchangeable. They all sort of looked alike, too — the boys all wearing their maroon home hockey jerseys and their hats backward, bright thatches of hair stuck through the loops at their foreheads like the start of a fire; the girls carbon copies of Courtney, by studious design.
Josie slipped inconspicuously into the heart of them, because she looked like Courtney, too. Her tangle of hair had been blown glass-straight; her heels were three inches high, even though there was still snow on the ground.
She turned to him. At this end of the table, the guys were rolling straw wrappers into spitballs and talking about the end of spring skiing. He was a junior, too, but somehow puberty had passed him by. His arms and legs were skinny and white and splayed like a stickbug; his head was tipped backward on the lip of the chair; his mouth, as he snored, was wide open. He pinched the side of her waist, a caliper and a criticism all at once.
Josie looked down at the fries. With a choke and a sputter, Derek startled awake. Derek spat into a napkin and rubbed his mouth hard. He glanced around to see who else had been watching. Matt leaned over and kissed her neck.
He drew Josie to her feet and then turned to his friends. Zoe Patterson was wondering what it was like to kiss a guy who had braces. Not that it was a remote possibility for her anytime in the near future, but she figured that it was something she ought to consider before the moment actually caught her off guard. And honestly, was there any place better than a stupid math class to let your mind wander? McCabe, who thought he was the Chris Rock of algebra, was doing his daily stand-up routine.
As he turned to the board, Zoe looked up at the clock. She counted along with the second hand until it was on the dot and then popped out of her seat to hand Mr. McCabe a pass. Zoe hefted her backpack onto her shoulders and walked out of the classroom. She had to meet her mom in front of the school at — parking was killer, so it would be a drive-by pickup.
Mid-class, the halls were hollow and resonant; it felt like trudging through the belly of a whale. It was warm enough outside to unzip her jacket and tilt her face to the sky, thinking of summer and soccer camp and what it would be like when her palate expander was finally removed. Would they get stuck together like jammed gears and have to be taken to the Emergency room at the hospital, and how totally humiliating would that be?
Zoe ran her tongue along the ragged metal fenceposts in her mouth. Maybe she should just temporarily join a convent. And just about then, something exploded. Patrick sat at a red light in his unmarked police car, waiting to turn onto the highway.
Beside him, on the passenger seat, was a paper bag with a brick of cocaine inside it. He fiddled with the volume button of the dispatch radio just in time to hear the fire department being sent to the high school for some kind of explosion.
Probably the boiler; the school was old enough for its internal structure to be falling apart. The discharge of a gun in Sterling was rare enough to have him narrow his attention to the voice on the dispatch radio, waiting for an explanation. Patrick wheeled the car in a U-turn and started toward the school with his lights flashing. Other voices began to transmit in static bursts: officers stating their positions in town; the on-duty supervisor trying to coordinate manpower and calling for mutual aid from Hanover and Lebanon.
Their voices knotted and tangled, blocking each other so that everything and nothing was being said at once. Once was in Maine, when a deadbeat dad had taken an officer hostage. Once was in Sterling, during a potential bank robbery that turned out to be a false alarm. Signal meant that everyone, immediately, was to get off the radio and free dispatch up for the emergency.
It was a clear acknowledgment that what they were dealing with was not routine. Chaos was a constellation of students, running out of the school and trampling the injured. Chaos was two girls, hugging each other and sobbing. Chaos was blood melting pink on the snow; it was the drip of parents that turned into a stream and then a raging river, screaming out the names of their missing children.
Chaos was a TV camera in your face; not enough ambulances; not enough officers; and no plan for how to react when the world as you knew it went to pieces. Patrick pulled halfway onto the sidewalk and grabbed his bulletproof vest from the back of the car. Already, adrenaline was pulsing through him, making the edges of his vision swim and his senses more acute.
By the time the SWAT team got here, a hundred more shots might be fired; a kid might be killed. He drew his gun. Patrick pushed through the double doors, past students who were shoving each other in an effort to get outside. Fire alarms blared, pulsing so loud that at first Patrick had to strain to hear the gunshots.
He grabbed the coat of a boy streaking past him. The boy wrenched away from Patrick. Ceiling tiles had been shot off and a fine grey dust coated the broken bodies that lay twisted on the floor.
Patrick ignored all of this, going against most of his training — running past doors that might hide a perp, disregarding rooms that should have been searched — instead driving toward the direction of the noise and the shrieks with his weapon drawn and his heart beating through every inch of his skin.
Turning a corner, Patrick slipped on blood and heard another gunshot — this one loud enough to ring in his ears like a nightmare. Gesturing to the two cops beside him, they swept into the open double doors of the gymnasium. Patrick scanned the space — the handful of sprawled bodies, the basketball cart overturned and the globes resting against the far wall — and no shooter.
Patrick spun around to the entrance again, to see if that was the case, and then heard another shot. It was a locker room, tiled white on the walls and the floor. He glanced down, saw the fanned spray of blood at his feet, and edged his gun around the corner wall. Two bodies lay unmoving at one end of the locker room. At the other, closer to Patrick, a slight boy crouched beside a bank of lockers. He wore a t-shirt that read Have a Whale of a Time! He held a pistol up to his head with one shaking hand.
A new rush of blood surged through Patrick. Patrick let his forefinger brush gently against the trigger just as the boy opened his fingers wide as a starfish.
The pistol fell to the floor, skittering across the tile. His head was spinning and his nose was running and his pulse was a military tattoo, but he could vaguely hear one of the other officers calling this in over the radio: Sterling, we have one in custody. Just as seamlessly as it had started, it was over — at least as much as something like this could be considered over, anytime soon. He sank down to his knees, mostly because his legs simply gave out from underneath them, and pretended that this was intentional; that he wanted to check out the two bodies lying just feet away from the shooter.
He was vaguely aware of the shooter being pushed out of the locker room by one of the officers, to a waiting cruiser downstairs. A boy, dressed in a hockey jersey. There was a puddle of blood underneath his side, and a gunshot wound through his forehead. He turned the brim around in his hands, an imperfect circle. The girl lying next to him was face down, blood spreading out from beneath her temple. She was barefoot, and on her toenails was bright pink polish — just like the stuff Tara had put on Patrick.
It made his heart catch. Lost Innocence. As a novel that depicts the terrible things teenagers endure and do to each other, Nineteen Minutes is concerned with the idea of lost innocence. During his high school years, Peter realizes he is in love with Josie, sparking a drastic chain of events. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.
Press ESC to cancel. Research Paper. Ben Davis April 8, Is the book Nineteen Minutes a movie? Which Jodi Picoult books have been made into movies? Is the book Nineteen Minutes based on a true story?
0コメント