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Twelve
 
 

Twelve [Paperback]

Nick McDonell
2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (155 customer reviews)
List Price: CDN$ 15.95
Price: CDN$ 11.64 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 25. Details
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Paperback, April 18 2003 CDN $11.64  

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Product Description

From Amazon

On the surface, Nick McDonell's debut novel Twelve (written when the well-connected former prep-schooler was 17) feels like an East Coast Less Than Zero: the laconic style and episodic plot; the privileged ennui, drugs, and pop culture sensibility (with sprinklings of Prada, FUBU, North Face, and Nokia replacing Zero's Armani, English Beat T-shirts, Wayfarer sunglasses, and Betamax); the Christmas break setting; even the italicized flashbacks--it's all there. But Twelve also shares its casual, youthful arrogance with the jaded aggressiveness and jagged style of Larry Clark's Kids.

McDonell has crafted a pulsing narrative that clips along at an after-hours pace, pulling the reader along like an ominous rip tide, shifting easily from the Upper East Side to Harlem to Central Park to introduce a cast of loosely connected characters. White Mike, Twelve's clean-living, Cheerios-loving, milkshake-drinking drug dealer, drives the majority of the barely-there plot. ("Mike uses a teaspoon to eat his cereal, not a big soup spoon, because he likes to have less milk in his mouth with each bite" is about as deep as it gets.) Character development is limited to an easy shorthand ("Long legs, large breasts, blond hair, blue eyes, high cheekbones.") that results in a simple surface-skimming, leaving one too many caricatures of the very youth culture McDonell is writing about. Readers will see the blood-spattered, penultimate set piece coming down Fifth Avenue from page one, but any potential shock value or drama is immediately deflated in Twelve's head-scratching hangover of a denouement. --Brad Thomas Parsons --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

"White Mike" dresses in an overcoat and lives with his dad on Manhattan's Upper East Side (his mom died of breast cancer not too long ago). The 17-year-old doesn't smoke, doesn't drink and doesn't do drugs. He dropped out of high school and now sells drugs pot and an Ecstasy-like upper called "twelve" to the city's moneyed teens. In this shocker of a first novel, McDonell who was 17 when he wrote it carries readers through White Mike's frantically spinning world, one alternately peopled with obscenely wealthy teenagers who live in gated townhouses with parents rarely in town and FUBU-clad basketball players in Harlem. In terse, controlled prose, McDonell describes five days in White Mike's life during Christmas break. He introduces a host of characters, ranging from Sara Ludlow ("the hottest girl at her school by, like, a lot") to Lionel ("a creepy dude" with "brown and yellow bloodshot eyes" who also sells drugs), writing mainly in the present tense, but sometimes flashing back in italics. His prose darts from one scene and character to the next, much like a cab zipping down city streets, halting quickly at a red light and then accelerating madly as soon as the light turns green. And although it brims with New York references e.g., the MetLife Building and Lenox Hill Hospital this is really a story about excess and its effects. The final scene, at a raging New Year's Eve party, will leave readers stunned, as well as curious as to what might come next from this precocious writer.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
WHITE MIKE IS thin and pale like smoke. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews

155 Reviews
5 star:
 (32)
4 star:
 (31)
3 star:
 (24)
2 star:
 (23)
1 star:
 (45)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
2.9 out of 5 stars (155 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5.0 out of 5 stars Good book, May 18 2008
By 
This review is from: Twelve (Hardcover)
Twelve was one of my top favorite reads. I enjoyed its basic vision of a life lived as if consequences happen to other people, I like the theme of universal alienation and hedonism, and could empathise with most of the characters' basic disgust with the world around them. Why not?
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2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting story concept, but still needs work, July 19 2004
By 
George Gerritsen (Foster City, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Twelve (Paperback)
I found this book completely by accident while browsing the bookshelf of a vacation home I rented while vacationing in Hawaii. I thought I would give it a try, but I was very disappointed. The good news, however, was that the story is a quick one (I finished it in around 3 to 4 hours).

The plot tells of a rather interesting story, but the characters are poorly developed and everything is pretty much lacking in detail. In addition, I did not really care for the way the author told the story. He basically jumps from scene to scene with some scenes lasting only a paragraph or two. I've seen this work well in other literary works, but I felt that it did not lend itself well to this one.

The book ends rather abruptly in a scene that makes very little sense and left me wondering why I picked the book up in the first place.

Now, I realize that a very young author wrote this and it is his first published novel. I can see a lot of creativity there and I am sure that his future works will be much more polished.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Believe the hype, July 17 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Twelve (Hardcover)
With wonderfully blunt descriptions and carefully formulated insights into the upper classes of the American society, characters and events are worryingly believable. In telling a story that everyone knew was happening but nobody wanted to admit, it may go on to be as revolutionary as 'The Catcher In the Rye' was in its day, and secure its deserved status as a cult classic of our time.
Like 'The Catcher...', people will formualte their own views on 'Twelve', and be they good or bad, they will surely prompt some sort of debate. You will love it or hate it, but either way, you have to read it.
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