Mandy: I was ripping my CD collection onto my iPod, and I realized I proudly own every Backstreet Boys album.

Angie: I was a fan of N’Sync. This is going to be a problem, isn’t it?

Mandy: If you choose to enjoy the music of the inferior boy band of the 90s, that’s just fine with me. N’Stink.

Angie: I would argue with you, but I really don’t care. Boy bands weren’t my thing. I was rockin’ with Marilyn Manson in the 90s.

Mandy: Ah, the beautiful people.

Angie: Too bad he wasn’t one of the beautiful people. That face paint takes dedication though. I only spare 10 minutes for mine every morning.

Mandy: I was scared of him until I saw him in an interview. He’s actually very intelligent and relaxed. He’s not as angry as his music might suggest.

Angie: Don’t tell anyone that! Who are we going to blame for teenage rebellion, if not Marilyn Manson?

Mandy: In the 50s, we blamed Elvis’ pelvis.

Angie: The Beatles just wanted to hold our hand and we told them to get a haircut.

Mandy: It’s funny how Elvis and The Beatles were blamed for corrupting entire generations and are now considered legends.

Angie: If their music taught us anything, it was that all you need is love.

Mandy: And the importance of avoiding blue suede shoes.

Angie: Scary stuff. I can see why it caused a panic. The Beatles and Elvis were never blamed for teen on teen violence, though. Marilyn Manson has that distinction.

Mandy: Society is quick to point the blame at musicians when teens become aggressive, but in Jodi Picoult’s novel, “Nineteen Minutes”, she suggests that society plays a starring role in that drama.

Angie: Picoult novels take some serious emotional stamina. She is an amazing writer, but her subjects and themes are dark and heavy. They aren’t for the lighthearted or weak willed. They are especially hard if you have children, work with children, know any children, or have seen children once from across a football field.

Mandy: Her novels are what I call ‘book club’ books. You must discuss what you’ve read with a friend, so you might as well buy two. And a friend if they’re on sale.

Angie: Picoult loves the moral gray area, which is rife with debate.

Mandy: In “Nineteen Minutes” we witness a community dealing with a school shooting and it’s aftermath. The shooting happens immediately. The majority of the book is what happens after. It’s only through flashbacks that we know what caused the unthinkable to become possible.

Angie: Picoult never shies away from uncomfortable topics, and school shootings make everyone uneasy. The part that terrifies us to the core is we never really know anyone. We have to put faith into hundreds of strangers everyday that they will not cause us, and our children, harm.

Mandy: Peter Houghton, the shooter, is bullied from the moment he steps on the bus in Kindergarten. Through flashbacks, we observe the abuse and humiliation he suffers on a daily basis. We see the events that transformed a little boy into a killer.

Angie: It’s the flashbacks that are hardest to read. As a mother, I anxiously looked for the moment when Peter turned from a toddler, who needed his mother to kiss his scraped knees, into a murderer. I wanted to reassure myself that he wasn’t a normal kid. That there were signs from the beginning that he was a bad egg from a bad home.

Mandy: Because we always assume it comes back to bad parenting.

Angie: I think we want it to be bad parenting. It makes us feel safe to point at a cause and say, ‘that’s why’. And because as parents it gives us control. We grasp at any reason to believe we can prevent this from happening to our families: that we aren’t like those bad parents. But Picoult refuses to give us that. She wants us to reexamine every thing we’ve done as parents and look for the fault lines.

Mandy: Peter’s mother, Lacy, is probably the most interesting character. She raised her son with love and compassion. She couldn’t, or didn’t, want to see what was happening to him every day. And now she’s the mother of a monster. Her dilemma is figuring out how to love her child after all the pain he caused. Picoult wants the reader to accept that children will inevitably disappoint their parents.

Angie: Lacy isn’t that different from the rest of the adults in “Nineteen Minutes”. None of them knows how to deal with bullying.

Mandy: The cartoon version of a bully is the lone, tough guy stealing your lunch money. According to Picoult, that’s not who real bullies are. They are the popular girls and the cute boys. They are the ones who parents adore and the community respects.

Angie: Without kids like Peter there couldn’t be a popular crowd. To quote Marilyn Manson, “The weak ones are there to justify the strong.”

Mandy: Picoult’s adults are leery of interfering because they fear Peter will suffer more when they aren’t around. Some feel he needs to learn how to stand up for himself while others dismiss the urgency of trifling matters such as name calling. They shrug it off as kids just being kids. High school is looked at as a rite of passage. Just another thing we have to survive to become successful members of society. Unfortunately, not everyone is surviving.

Angie: Bullying affects the same emotional scarring as sexual abuse, but it isn’t given the solemnity. They are both predators.

Mandy: I think that when mass shootings occur, especially when they involve schools, we think, as a nation, we are sympathetic because losing a child in a violent way is a collective fear. That’s something we can all understand. But what led up to the moment? That’s something we don’t understand. More importantly, how can it be prevented from happening again?

Angie: Peter is told to walk away, ignore it, or is given reasons as to why he is bullied. He doesn’t care why. He just want it to stop. So the question Picoult asks in “19 Minutes” is: When is it OK for a victim to fight back?

Mandy: She also tells us to stop blaming music, video games, and movies. These are influences, not causes. Rock and roll never killed anyone.

Angie: Except Buddy Holly.

Mandy and Angie rock and roll in Albert Lea. BookENDS appears bimonthly on Sundays. You can email them at bookendscolumn@gmail.com.