CONCORD, N.H. (AP) – A best-selling author’s novel about a school shooting has rattled nerves in her hometown of Hanover, where high school officials pulled it from the reading list amid fears the fictional town too closely resembles the real thing.

Jodi Picoult’s “Nineteen Minutes” won’t even be published until March 6. Students at Hanover High School were among three schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts given advance copies to study. In the novel, an ostracized teen living in Sterling, N.H. – a wealthy, Upper Valley college town on the Vermont border – goes on a school shooting rampage, killing 10 people in 19 minutes.

Picoult said she’s set nearly all of her novels in fictional New Hampshire towns, and “Nineteen Minutes” is no different. She said the story is closer to Columbine, Colo., and other towns where there have been mass school shootings.

“I did not write it to be Hanover; there is not a single character in the book based on anyone in Hanover,” Picoult said a phone interview Wednesday from her home.

But school officials say they were disturbed by Sterling and Hanover’s shared traits: Hanover is home to Dartmouth College, Sterling has Sterling College; Hanover’s neighbors are Lebanon and Norwich, Vt., Sterling’s neighbors are the same; Hanover High School’s colors are maroon and silver, Sterling High athletes wear maroon jerseys. And both towns have Storrs pond, a popular swimming hole.

“Some of our mental-health people in the school looked at it and said ‘Whoa.’ It described our atrium. It described Storrs Pond,” Hanover High Principal Deb Gillespie told the Valley News of Lebanon. The school, which teaches students in Hanover and Norwich, was closed Wednesday because of snow, but via e-mail, Gillespie and superintendent Wayne Gersen declined Associated Press interview requests.

Gillespie announced in an e-mail last week to parents that teachers would stop teaching the book, the Valley News reported. Students can continue studying “Nineteen Minutes” on their own so long as they discuss their progress regularly with teachers. Gillespie said she doesn’t believe the book would inspire a shooting at the school, but said the fictional shooting date, March 6, 2007, might make some students afraid to attend school that day.

“I don’t think somebody’s going to come in and shoot somebody that day because it happens in the book,” Gillespie said. “Is there some potential for upset? Yes.”

An excerpt from “Nineteen Minutes” reads: “Chaos was a constellation of students, running out of the school and trampling the injured. Chaos was the boy holding a handmade sign in an upstairs window that read HELP US. Chaos was two girls hugging each other and sobbing. Chaos was blood melting pink on the snow.”

Picoult said in one class, “Nineteen Minutes” was being taught alongside James Dickey’s “Deliverance,” which depicts sodomy and violence, Vladimir Nabokov’s child-sex novel “Lolita,” and Anthony Burgess’ violent “The Clockwork Orange.”

“I don’t know really what makes “Lolita” any less disturbing than “Nineteen Minutes,” she said.

Picoult’s son is a 10th grader at Hanover High. She said supports Gillespie’s decision but is disappointed students in her hometown wouldn’t be able to have supervised discussions about school violence.

“Rather than sweeping it under the carpet, I truly believe it’s something that we need to let kids talk about and let kids really air their feelings,” she said.

Picoult is author of more than a dozen novels. Her last one, “The Tenth Circle” is a USA Today and Publisher’s Weekly top 10 best-seller.