Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult was published in 2007 and awarded the ALA’s Outstanding Books for the College Bound and Lifelong Learners Award.
BANNED in Charlotte, Clay, Collier, Escambia, Hamilton, Hernando, Highlands, Hillsborough, Indian River, Jackson, Lake, Lee, Manatee, Marion, Martin, Nassau, Okaloosa, Orange, Polk, Santa Rosa, Seminole, St. Lucie, St. Johns, Union, Volusia and Walton County public schools
Nineteen Minutes is the amount of time it takes for Peter Houghton to commit a mass shooting at his New Hampshire high school in Picoult’s widely banned novel.
In January 2022, a citizen of St. Lucie County, Dale Galiano, submitted objections to 17 books found in St. Lucie Public School libraries, including Nineteen Minutes. He said the book about school shootings was not suited to student comprehension: “There are things in there that the mind is not prepared for, they haven’t lived enough of a life to figure it out.” The St. Lucie Board of Education voted in favor of the book’s removal, stating that “Although they felt it was an important piece of literature, they felt it was an adult book.”
Only one month after Nineteen Minutes’ publication in March 2007, 32 people were murdered on the Virginia Tech campus in the most deadly school shooting in modern U.S. history. Since then, instances of school shootings have spiked, peaking recently in 2023 with 351 tragedies in one year. On April 17, 2025, I survived a school shooting while walking to Florida State University’s Student Union.
Nineteen Minutes was the most banned book of the ‘23 – ‘24 school year. In Florida, this is attributed to its depiction of rape – not its depiction of gun violence.
A single page depicting date rape violated HB 1069, a Florida statute that ordered the removal of any book that “depicts or describes sexual conduct” from Florida public school shelves. Many Florida school boards censored Nineteen Minutes’ discussion of school shootings, citing HB 1069. In ‘24 – ‘25, Jodi Picoult, author of Nineteen Minutes, served as a plaintiff in the lawsuit that struck down significant portions of HB 1069.
In response to the mass ban of Nineteen Minutes, Picoult stated, “hundreds of kids have told me that reading Nineteen Minutes stopped them from committing a school shooting, or showed them they were not alone in feeling isolated. My book, and the ten thousand others that have been pulled off school library shelves this year, give kids a tool to deal with an increasingly divided and difficult world. These book banners aren’t helping children. They are harming them.”