Welcome to today's meeting of the Valshi Band Book Club.

I'm MSNBC's Ali Velshi.

Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Rob Elementary,

the Covenant School. The sound of gunshots in these school hallways reverberated across the

nation, a legacy of gun violence in the classroom. According to the Washington Post, more than 356,000

students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine. There isn't a child, a teacher,

a parent starting this school year who hasn't considered, if even for the briefest of moments,

what if today it's me?

Today we're looking at two books that grapple with what comes before and after the pain

and trauma of a school shooting, 19 minutes by Jody Pico, and Give a Boy a Gun by Todd

Strasser. We are featuring these two books because we believe they can generate useful

conversation, help listeners work through very serious feelings, and to what are

extent possible, aid in understanding. We are featuring these books because we believe

there is power in fiction, especially band fiction.

Maybe 19 minutes or give a boy a gun can be a guiding light when you or your child is

interested in exploring the painful reality from the safety of the written word.

Reading cannot stop a bullet, but it can help with the wounds we cannot see,

the emotional trauma that an entire generation of American children now carry with them.

Let's open our first book.

Nineteen minutes by best-selling and award-winning author Jody Picoe takes place in the fictional small town of Stirling, New Hampshire, in 2007.

Throughout the book, time flashes between the past and the present, before, after, and during a school shooting.

The titular time frame is in reference to how long the school shooting lasted,

...