Book Report: Nineteen Minutes Flashbacks in welcher Zeit?

Hallo ich muss morgen einen Book-Report
über das buch "nineteen minutes" halten.

meine frage ist:

in dem buch gibt es oft flashbacks, auf einem blatt steht das die zusammenfassung von dem buch im present sein soll, aber wie is das mit den flashbacks im present oder past tense? (ich erzähle ab dem fettgedruckten von den flashbacks) im moment steht des mehr oder weniger im present aber keine ahnung ob das so jetzt stimmt :S

hier der ganze book report, Verbesserungen gerne erwünscht:

Jodi Lynn Picoult was born in 1966 in New York.
She was awarded the New England Bookseller
Award for fiction in 2003.
The thriller novel, Nineteen Minutes,
published on March the 6, 2007.
It was her first book at first position on the New York Times Best Seller list.

The story begins on March the 6, 2007, showing the lives of a number of characters on just another typical day in a small town in New Hampshire called Sterling. Alex Cormier, a superior court judge, is rushing to get to work while her daughter, Josie, a high school student, gets ready for a test after a long night of studying. The story moves from character to character and include Lacy and Peter Houghton, Detective Patrick, Matt Royston and so on.

At the local high school, we follow a routine day of students in classes and in the cafeteria during lunch period. As suddenly gun shots are fired. Patrick, the detective on the Sterling police force, hears on his radio about the shooting at Sterling High School. He changes route to the school and when he arrives, he searches the school to seek out the gunman. After passing a lot of dead and wounded victims, he catches the shooter in the locker room and he is taken away. Patrick sees a student on the floor, surrounded in blood. It was Matt. He was hit by a shot in the stomach and by another one in the head, while his girlfriend, Josie, is shocked and cannot remember what happened. The shooting kills ten people (nine students and one teacher) and wounds many others.

Throughout the book, the time flashes back and forth between events before and after the shooting.
In the past, the reader learns that:
Alex and Lacy meet each other as Alex is pregnant with Josie. Alex is shortly before the exam become pregnant. At the beginning she doesn’t want the child because the father, Logan Rourke, he is fifteen years older, her Professor and he already has a family and urges her to abort the child. But in the end Alex decides for the child, and Lacy helps her at birth.

Peter and Josie were once the best of friends, but Peter is often the victim of hard bullying, beginning with the time he enters kindergarten and a older boy throws out his lunchbox through the bus window. Since that day not a day passed on which Peter is not mocks by classmates. The bullying continues all throughout his childhood. When Josie is in the area, she defends him.

But one day as Alex finds the children with a gun, she argues with Lacy and forbids her daughter to deal with Peter, who had secretly taken the key to the weapons cabinet of his father.

As they get older, Josie become a friend of Courtney and part of the popular crowd.
Peter is an outsider at home. He has an older brother named Joey. Peter often thinks his parents favored Joey over him. Joey is a popular student, writes good grades, is athletic and endlessly teases his younger brother. He even fabricating a story that Peter was adopted. When Joey is killed in a car accident, this creates a bigger gap between Peter and his parents.

Josie fall in love with Matt, which causes her to end her friendship with Peter entirely. Matt often led his other jock friends, mainly Drew, in bullying Peter and often they called him "homo". The bullying only got worse once Matt began dating Josie. He is a jealous boyfriend who admitted he didn’t like "sharing Josie" with others. On one occasion, Peter approaches Josie after school to try talking to her. Matt beating him up while Peter bled and cried in front of the school.

The flashbacks also reveal several subplots: The difficult relationship between Josie and her single mother Alex, Alex`s dilemma of being a judge and a mother, Peter`s escape from bullying into to the world of video games, Josie`s fear of falling out of the popular crowd and her suicide back-up plan when she does, as well as Lewis Houghton teaching his son Peter how to hunt and how Peter get the guns he used for the school shooting.

One month before the shooting, Peter realizes that he has feelings for Josie, and sends her an email expressing his love. When the mail arrives, Josie was standing in the shower, and her friend Courtney, who is in her room, opens the message. After she had read Peter`s lines, she forwarded the e-mail to Drew and asks him to send it to all students of Sterling High. Then she deletes the message on Josie computer. The next day Courtney lies to Peter, she tell him Josie was secretly in love with him and would leave Matt, when Peter is openly known to her. A few hours later, Peter come into the cafeteria and go at the table, where Josie with her clique sit, and asks her if she wanted to go out with him.
Matt stands behind him and rips his pants down, including the underwear and exposes his genitals to a cafeteria full of students. And all students joins in Matt`s laughter.

After the School shooting you can also see the different reactions of the persons in the story.
Peter says to Jordan, his defense attorney, the endless bullying was his motivation for the shooting: "It had to stop."
The Reader also understand the helpless parents from Peter. They are confused whether they can still love their son. And ask themself was it their fault? Alex first wants to be the judge of the process but Jordan, want her daughter, Josie, as witness. But Josie is shocked and says she can’t remember what happened. On top of that the reader become to know that Alex and Patrick fall in love which each other.
Five months after the school massacre the court process takes places.
And Josie can remember what really happens in the locker room and she tells the truth at the court. But I doesn’t want to tell you how the story ends and what’s the court decision is, because I want you to read this book.

I think it’s a very exiting, emotional and interesting story,
because you see the action in different positions and you understand all of them.
And you remember Nineteen Minutes can change everything.
Jodi Picoult deals in "Nineteen Minutes" not only with the shooter and the reasons of the school massacre, she also looks into the question of what this means for the parents of the offender and the relatives of his victims.

Jodi Picoult jumps in the chronology back and forth, but the chapter headings are "Seventeen years ago," "hours after”, “the day after” so the reader doesn’t lose its understanding.