Jodi Picoult - Salem Falls

Love can redeem a man ... but secrets and lies can condemn him.

A handsome stranger comes to the sleepy New England town Salem Falls in hopes of burying his past: Once a teacher at a girls' prep school, Jack St. Bride was destroyed when a student 's crush sparked a powder keg of accusation.
Now, washing dishes for Addie Peabody at the Do-Or-Diner, he slips quietly into his new routine and Addie finds this unassuming man fitting easily inside her heart. But amid the rustic calm of Salem Falls a quartet of teenage girls harbor dark secrets - and they maliciously target Jack with a shattering allegation. Now, at the center of a modern-day witch hunt, Jack is forced once again to proclaim his innocence: to a town searching for answers, to a justice system where truth becomes a slippery concept written in shades of gray, and to the woman who has come to love him.

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The past eighth months Jack was a prisoner convicted of statutory rape. He was offered a plea bargain and his only way to get over with it was accept the offer even if the accusations against him where a mere fiction of a young girls diary.

Trying to get his act together, get a life back he arrives in small town Salem Falls and gets a job as dishwasher in Addie Peabody's Do-Or-Diner. Dutifully he registers at the sheriffs office as a sexual offender.
His relationship with Addie soon intensifies bound through Jack's closeness and fear of being touched and Addie's mourning for her daughter who died years ago. When everything seems to be going it's way the town learns of Jack's former conviction there is no way they are willing to accept a person like him in their little, peaceful town.

Gillian Duncan as a close circle of friends, a coven. The girls are trying to witches, doing good for the people in their town when one of their spells actually works. They decide if their powers are such strong they also could do good for people who have been done wrong by others. Seeing Jack for the first time Gillian develops a crush on him and has to live with his rejection. Only she doesn't want to accept it.

So it happens that Jack after he got terribly beaten up, had a fallout with Addie, runs drunkenly through the woods when he disturbs one of the girls rituals.
The next day he's arrested for the rape of Gillian Duncan.

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What disturbs me most was the fact that Jack is a character I am used to from my own child/teenage hood. A caring person, a teacher rarely seen these days and certainly bound to suspicion in the United States. It showed me again the differences in attitude between where I come from and where I live today. Being a male teacher and/or coach and being male in the U. S. seems to be just what it is these days: a hot seat I never would want to sit in. It is terrible to know what can be interpreted into a friendly slap on the back.

However, the book keeps a few surprises that aren't mentioned in the books description but as you read they just seem normal, fitting into the plot.
Although I think the ending fell out quite flat without much surprises at that point, it is entertaining from the beginning to the end.

Rating:
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Paperback: 464 pages
Publisher: Washington Square Press (August 6, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743418719
ISBN-13: 978-0743418713

Jodi Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

In Sterling, New Hampshire, 17-year-old high school student Peter Houghton has endured years of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of classmates. His best friend, Josie Cormier, succumbed to peer pressure and now hangs out with the popular crowd that often instigates the harassment. One final incident of bullying sends Peter over the edge and leads him to commit an act of violence that forever changes the lives of Sterling’s residents.

Even those who were not inside the school that morning find their lives in an upheaval, including Alex Cormier. The superior court judge assigned to the Houghton case, Alex—whose daughter, Josie, witnessed the events that unfolded—must decide whether or not to step down. She’s torn between presiding over the biggest case of her career and knowing that doing so will cause an even wider chasm in her relationship with her emotionally fragile daughter. Josie, meanwhile, claims she can’t remember what happened in the last fatal minutes of Peter’s rampage. Or can she? And Peter’s parents, Lacy and Lewis Houghton, ceaselessly examine the past to see what they might have said or done to compel their son to such extremes.

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On March, 6th, 2007 an explosion announces the unbelieveable happening at Sterling Highschool:
A day in the lives of many that would change their whole life and future.
When the first student drops on the floor nobodys knows that rampage and revenge has only just started.
After his first killings Peter Houghton sits in the cafeteria, finishing a bowl of cereals, gets up and continues his killing spree.

After the death of 10 people and 160 shot bullets the police finds him huddled up in the gyms locker room, together with his unconscious childhood friend Josie and her dead boyfriend.

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Peter's childhood and youth partly reads itself as many do. Those which are "unfortunate" to be different and don't want to or can't be like the mainstream are the outsider, therefore often the targets of mocking and malice. Tackling the circumstances that might lead to school shootings I found the book a bit too much to be a dripping cliché.
Of course it is interesting to see through the shooter's eyes but I never felt that would justify what the main character Peter did. More important to me would have been a focus on his parents (whose faults also felt like the typical cliché), not only in the past but preferably in the present but that's just my opinion. Instead we get a denying father and a mother only asking herself what she did wrong.

To come to the plot itself I found a lot of characters far fetched and just too unbelievable to really have happened.
The ending is absolutely unrealistic and unbelievable. It seems forced and stands out of the rest of the book. Although the book is fictional it relates on facts and research of actually happened School shootings in the past. Why the writer felt the ending must not match the rest of the book is an unsolved mystery to me.

Overall, I didn't like it but I didn't dislike it either. For me it was just a collection of other facts about school shootings, circumstances and trial journals.
The book might be something for students to read in school and maybe learn about their everyday actions in school.

Rating:
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Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: Washington Square Press; Reprint edition (February 5, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0743496736
ISBN-13: 978-0743496735