Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

A school shooting shatters a small town, as it always does. The teenage shooter is arrested and brought to trial, with his living victims testifying against him. But the most important witness doesn't remember what happened, and she's terrified she will remember. This story tries to answer the question of how and why does this happen so often in America; what causes these troubled teens to lash out?

Nineteen Minutes follows multiple characters throughout the story, beginning on the day of the school shooting. We see the shooting and immediate aftermath before Picoult rewinds seventeen years and shows us the childhood of the shooter and his classmates. As the story jumps between the past and present we understand exactly what drove him to mass murder and we can even feel sympathy for him. Another viewpoint we get post-shooting is that of the shooter's parents, especially his mother. She is blamed by society for her son's actions because it's perceived to be a fault in her parenting. This is such a common belief that I've found myself thinking the same thing in the past. How could the parents let this happen? It's the number one question we all ask and we like to believe we're good parents and our child would never do something like that. Every parent believes this, but maybe we don't have as much control as we'd like to believe.