Thalia @ Pictures in the Words

Review: I have to say, Nineteen Minutes was a book that had great potential and was ruined by poor execution and scene choice. One of the too-many main characters, Josie Cormier, is a character that the reader doesn’t like at all. The first time the story springs to her point of view, you see she’s a popular girl and seems to be happy with her friends and boyfriend, Matt, despite her cold and stone-hearted attitude towards her mother, Alex. The reader gets a case of “eyeroll syndrome” during a scene in which Josie goes upstairs and contemplates swallowing a bunch of pills she’s pilfered from her mother little by little. A character the reader already doesn’t feel much sympathy towards wanting to kill herself ten or so pages into the story? It’s not much of a hook; especially when the reader learns Josie is unhappy with her popular friends. We discover Josie used to be best friends with another protagonist, Peter Houghton, and then ditched him for popularity. How can any reader sympathize with a character who wants to die because they got everything they wanted? It seems rather unfair to the people in the world who’ve actually died because they never felt good enough—especially when Josie has always been good enough.(read more on my blog at Thalia's Books!)