Twelve

Rating:
Summary: At least I finished it....
Review: I'm the only one I know who picked up this book and read the whole thing. While White Mike is interesting as a pro(?)tagonist, this book is a Jay McInerney meets Brett Easton Ellis meets Tama Janowitz nightmare. While the author demonstrates a nice grasp of language, his characters are superficially drawn (as well as being superficial) stereotypes that wander through a book until its complete cliched, trite, ridiculous, cop-out ending. American youth needs a voice, but this guy isn't it. All he does is show what the parents in the Nanny Diaries produced, but at least the Nanny Diaries is entertaining. Please, oh higher being, don't let this become a movie.

Rating:
Summary: Lost in the Rush
Review: Many reviews of this book are complaining about it's plot or lack thereof, and the fast pace with which McDonell breezes through his story.
However, this novel does possess many redeeming values. For one, it accurately represents the teenagers of the city. Most teenagers could recognize the Timmys or Mark Rothko's of their world. They know the Sarah Ludlows. Chris is the typical insecure teenage male, willing to host a party of proportions he would normally be uncomfortable with for the attention of Sarah. Andrew and Jessica could also be found in any high school across America.
The dialog is also realistic. The conflict between Hunter and Nana is typical.
The novel only fails with its ending. Claude's motivation is unclear and rushed.
McDonell's first attempt is definitely worth a read.

Rating:
Summary: Book Author Seems as Banal as his BOOK
Review: The novel, Twelve, I was shocked to find was written by a eighteen year-old. I thought the author was only twelve. His style has about as much feel and depth as the characters he decribes, which is nothing at all.
Was this book for a High School freshmen's english class? What a dud!
The author gives the feel that he doen't really know what he is talking about, nor what point he is trying to make. I get the sense that he didn't want to offend anyone, or take on anything difficult when he started to write this book.
The title is perfect though, it was written with all the style and grace that an average twelve year-old writer would possess.
I hope creative writing classes are on his schedule when he attends college, so he could learn to write at an average level.

Rating:
Summary: read....
Review: I wonder if the dislike people seem to have for this book is a disliking of it really, or its subject. I was impressed. I'm a 37 year old who hasn't forgotten what it was like to be 17. My youth played out differently from the priveleged have-it-all adolescent drug users in the book, but there is a common thread.

An excerpt from the book:

"...Just a couple of soft kids standing on the street, trying to get some weed, have some fun, fill the time, talk a certain way, dress a certain way, walk a certain way, be a certain way because the way they come from is unclear and uncool and with no direction, because no one really has anything to do, all across the city no one has anything to do, so they all do the same thing and make the same references to pop culture and their childhood cartoons...and everyone wants to get laid and be the cool kid and everyone wants to be a jock, and everyone wants and wants and wants."

Sound familiar?

I don't know why everyone is so hard on Nick McDonell. In my opinion he is extremely observant and an amazing storyteller. Remember, at seventeen he doesn't have hindsight or accumulated wisdom about this stuff. He's telling it as he sees it.

And this deserves a moment of our silence.

Rating:
Summary: The only redeeming quality is the nice cover.
Review: I disliked the book. I don't see how the characters in the books are in any way an accurate portrayal of today's youth. The cast of detached characters who don't seem to care about anything quickly gets repetitive and I was left wondering why I was bothering to read it at all.
I like the book cover though.

Rating:
Summary: very average
Review: reads like a pieced together collection of standard-issue angst - watch the lost manhattan boys and girls flail about - tra la la

Rating:
Summary: What is this book about????
Review: If there was a setting, a plot, or even a climax to this book I must have missed it! I also don't understand why Nick McDonell needed 98 chapters to write about nothing! It took all my energy to get through this book, I was bored from start to finish. Nice try!!

Rating:
Summary: Twelve
Review: This book is of average worth. I don't think it was anything special. Any well educated 18 year old with some time on his or her hands could have written it. The only reason he got this book published is because his father is the Managing Editor of Sports Illustrated (now thats a typical private school kid).

If you want to read a long high school essay, this book is for you.

Rating:
Summary: Shocking? Shockingly dull
Review: Self-aware teen writer Nick McDonell's novel "Twelve" burst into the literary market in a spray of irrelevent hype earlier this year. With a painfully two-dimensional cast and a fragmented non-storyline, "Twelve" is not shocking, just shockingly dull.

White Mike is a dropout drug dealer whose father ignores him and whose mother is dead of breast cancer. Hardly different from the spoiled rich kids he deals to, whose parents leave them on vacations and business, and ignore the resulting hedonism that they indulge in. Then there is Jessica, an addict of the drug Twelve, the creepy Lionel, unfortunate Hunter, "hottest girl" Sara, and numerous others. Murder, sex, drugs, and misery culminate in a violent New Year's Eve.

There isn't much of a plot to "Twelve." Several vaguely-connected characters drift in and out of various situations -- some of them connected to the vaguely-defined plot, some not. The actual text of the novel is very short. All the chapters are only a few pages long, and the shortest is one line long; the type is unusually large to expand this to a normal adult-novel length. The prose is stark and sparse to the point of being nonexistant. Hardly anything is described, beyond a description of blonde hair or rock-hard muscles, a smell or a spoon; it reads more like a screenplay, without the order and careful writing. The grand finale will annoy rather than shock, as McDonell seems to have no idea what to do with his plotlines.

And McDonell, precocious little man that he is, has also abandoned the basic rules of punctuation and grammar, making mistakes that I stopped making at the age of twelve. In the first two pages of White Mike's ponderings, his name is used in almost every sentence ("White Mike thought this. White Mike saw that"). In a chapter later in the book, almost every sentence begins with "He." And on page five, one of the sentences contains the word "and" eight times. The frequent run-on-sentences will cause even hardened readers to blink and squint. The dialogue is surreal: The characters seem to talk at random, zipping from one irrelevent topic to the next like gas molecules.

Those characters don't have much life to them. There is some effort in making us like White Mike, by giving us short, stark flashbacks to his life prior to and just after his mother's death. But every time the reader starts getting into Mike's head, we are jerked away to focus on one of the insipid teenagers who mope around New York, and their everyday decisions like where to get a haircut.

And like many young writers who shoot to stardom, McDonell is relentlessly aware of himself. Like his fellow teen writers Anselm Audley and Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, he sets out (one way or another) to prove how mature he is. He does this with randomly-applied profanity, graphic violence, and gratuitous sexual content. Worst of all, he uses none of these elements to further his sketchy plot. While the idea of Jessica trading sexual favors for the drug Twelve has promise, McDonell doesn't use it to evoke any emotions in the readers. Nor does he use the admittedly poignant flashbacks of White Mike's mother and her death, or the violent finale.

This is the sort of book that can only be published if one's godfather is a publisher -- a dull, poorly-written, pretentious excuse for a novel. If you're searching for a good teen writer, look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: This is isn't 12, it's less than zero
Review: For all of the hype of this protagonist being Holden Caulfield of our days, I can't help but think it is hauntingly familiar to Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero. Twelve compares to Less Than Zero in many ways: the drugs, the sex, even the authors were young adults when they wrote the novels.

I am always in search of the great protagonist-driven literature and this was not it. Not bad for a first effort, it comes off overcompensating in the angst department. And after a while it started to grate on my nerves. I felt the McDonell was trying to hard at the despair thing, or that he really is down and out.