Text-to-Text Connection: Nineteen Mintues By Jodi Picoult and Columbine by Dave Cullen

         I am reading the book Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult which takes place in the quiet suburban town of Sterling, New Hampshire. But then one day, a bullied and rage-fueled boy takes action and opens fire on students, killing many and traumatizing all of America. While I was reading this book, I thought about a book I read in 7th grade about the horror of Columbine- an actual event. These books were both about school shootings and the permanent effect it has on the people who experience it, but I found that they were very different.
        In Nineteen Minutes, the boy who is the shooter is very vulnerable and sad with an incredible amount of understandable anger. Jodi Picoult makes him almost relateable to, with ignorant parents who as much as they try will never understand and just being a loner makes you feel connected with Peter Houghton. Whereas in Columbine, the boys are psychopaths who were also bullied, but instead of hurting their anger kept mutating only to be released into a horrible crime.
          Since Columbine is reality, it should seem much more frightening than Nineteen Minutes, but Nineteen Minutes scares me more. This made me think about the reality and fiction aspect of the books, but not just the books, in real life. Recently, I was watching an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent and it left me amazed at the dynamic of the charcters and the unraveling storyline that never ceased to shock me. Yet when I watched Dateline: NBC (A show about real-life crimes happening to people) it didn't shake me at all. In fact, I was bored thirty minutes in. Everybody insists that it's scarier if it's real, but I beg to differ. In Nineteen Minutes, the descriptions of the rivers of blood that ran down the halls and deafening screams of students gave me chills. In Columbine, the interviews and stories of traumatized students was a little tedious. I think fantasy is scarier than reality because you can do anything you want with it, and that's what Jodi Picoult did.
         In conclusion, the book Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult and the book Columbine by Dave Cullen are similar because they both discuss tragedies of school shootings, but they are different because the shooter personalities are different and one is fiction and the other is reality.