Nineteen Minutes

I am not a big fan of Jodi Picoult. So why do I keep reading her books?

Hard to say. Last one I read, I read for a book group. This one, Nineteen Minutes - well, there is no excuse. I read it, but I didn't necessarily enjoy it.

Maybe I am hard to please. But I know good writing. And while Picoult is a decent writer, she is not great. Here are some tips so that she might appeal to a more discriminating reader:

• As she often does, Picoult shifts points of view. But in this book, it becomes annoying to the point of distraction. She shifts among at least eight primary narrators, then throws in six or seven more on occasion, and at least one just once or twice. Enough already - if you're doing it for emphasis, then it has lost its effect.

• Bad editing. Many of the descriptive paragraphs go on way too long, way too gushing, in their telling of mother/child love. And there are mistakes - she says at point they got the dog when the kid was 3, then she says, a few paragraphs later, that this dog had patience and had given pony rides to the same kid at age 2. Error control, please. It wasn't the only one - I just didn't document them all.

• You know early on what happens and, essentially, who the guilty party is. Yet the book goes on for 400 more pages. Something has to happen, right? So you begin to think, Picoult likes to yank the rug out from under you. What is the most outrageous possible explanation, possible outcome in all of this? You think about it, and of course you figure it out. In her attempt at over-the-top suspense, it just feels contrived.

• The books are beginning to feel too formulaic. Too many characters, all involved in this messy scenario, all with one sort of attachment or another to the main characters. It's just too much.

Now that it's done, time to move on to a new book. I have a bookclub pick waiting, but I also need to read Eclipse, No. 3 in the Twilight series. From one book of questionable writing to another ... but I have to know what happens before the rest of world tells me any more details!