Customer Reviews

Twelve

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(39)
3 star:		(33)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(48)

 

 

As a college student, I felt embarassed for my generation when I read this miserable book. There are better writers on every block of Manhattan than Nick McDonell. Absolutely pathetic. Great to know that his godfather published the book, though, and his dad got it promoted.

Joan Didion came to my school a few months ago and gave a talk. At one point, during questions afterward, I asked her point blank why she gave blurbs to books that it seems hard to imagine she could have had any respect for whatsoever. (I didn't mention Twelve by name, but I haven't noticed her name on many other books, and certainly none as wretched as this garbage.) There was a pause and then she sighed and said, "You get trapped into it. Old friends ask, and you don't want to put a sour note in decades of friendship because you wouldn't write a sentence or two."

Joan Didion is old friends with Nick McDonell's father.

The most disturbing thing about this book is all the hype around it. Yes, the kid was just a teenager when he wrote it and that's definitely an accomplishment, but there is no way this book would've gotten published had it not been for all the industry connections he had. Morgan Entrekin, his publisher, and owner of Atlantic Books (Grove is owned by Atlantic), is also Mcdonell's godfather. I mean the book is okay, but there isn't really anything original here. There's no new voice of sorts and the content is old-hat teen druggie stuff, so I can't see how everyone's calling him the New Hunter Thompson, or the new B.E. Ellis. He hasn't had enough writing experience to pull off the hard-fought prose of those who have earned their merits.

In this case, the book in question is a pretentious, boring, affected, self-indulgent novella bloated to nearly 250 pages. Its themes are passe, its plot familiar, its characters DOA, its dialogue laughable. I'm 16 years old, and I'm all for celebrating young talent... but this isn't it.

TWELVE isn't the worst book ever, it just isn't very good. It's a prep school fantasy by a boy who was good at english and felt that there was something apocalyptic or at least meaningful in the teenage parties and consumerism that surround him. The upper east side is full of young ironists who quote Veblen and Ellis, sadly McDonell is not one of them, otherwise he would have known better.

If you want to read about spoiled rich kids, LESS THAN ZERO is the classic, it's short and funny. The sequel, RULES OF ATTRACTION is pointless, but it should be mandatory reading for anyone thinking of going to an eastern liberal arts college.

Ellis borrowed much of his style from Dennis Cooper. If yoou want to read something "shocking" TRY is a much better book about missing love and prevalent drugs.

Please note that of all of the reviews, the highest ratings were given by 13-year-olds who spell recommend with two c's. That said, Twelve is a predictable adolescent novel with a ridiculous ending that turns what could be interesting characters into nothing more than caricatures: the pretty, but snobby girl, the angry teens, etc. If you want a quick read that won't leave you caring about its characters or plot, go out and buy. If you want to learn something new about NYC's teenaged elite, this is not the book for you.

This is the worst book I have read all year. A complete ripoff of Less Than Zero, right down to the italicized digressions--except in this books, it's a crutch that McDonell relies on because he has no story to tell, and no interesting characters. And if you can't see the ending coming by page 30 or so, you might an idiot. It's also very unconvincing--what drug, exactly, are they supposed to be on when they're tripping? (That's a ridiculous scene, by the way.) And what's up with the rich prep school kid going to prison and finding out it's 'not so bad'? Please.

The sex scenes (what few there are--this book is NOT shocking) are pretty ridiculous too: stuff to the effect of "The big scary black guy watched the virginal white girl take off her sweater. His menacing yellow eyes stared at her pale breasts." I mean, come on. And how come the white drug dealer is an intelligent, philosophical, sypathetic character (or is supposed to be, at least) while the black drug dealer is this hulking, evil monster?

And then, after I read it, I discovered that Nick McDonell's godfather owns the company that published the book. Funny, it doesn't mention that on the back flap. But it explains everything.

Thank you, Nick McDonell, for educating us about affluent New York City's teens' "morals" and pathetic problems. Now I can die happy.
All right, seriously, the book was BAD. Pointless, even. The readers keep expecting some explanation for all the bizzare and almost evil behavior exibitied by most of the characters, but alas, no such luck. Gosh, WHAT a waste of time. There was absolutely no depth to any of the characters and the plot was nonexistant. Boy, oh boy I had to wipe my brow with relief when my ordeal was over.
I first heard about the book in the newspaper. Many people gave "Twelve" rave reviews. I am unclear as to why.
Oh, and don't get me started about the ending "climax" scene. ...I don't want to give it all away, so I'll just say that I almost laughed in disbelief. Someone on this website commented that Mr. McDonell wrote the TRUTH... *ahem* If you say so... I, on the other hand did not find that scene truthful, but rather an excuse to add meaningless violence. Meaningless, because the book was obviously a lost cause loooooong before the grand finale.
The bottom line is, feel free to read this book. Maybe after you've finished you'll have a new outlook on life and might even be able to relate to it...then again if you're not a rich teenager in New York City, perhaps not.

The editorial reviews for this book are good. I thought they may be a little optimistic - trying to give a new, young author a little boost. I wanted to like this book for that same reason. I was sorely disappointed. I found the story to be choppy and rather pointless. Completely without value. Am I being harsh? Probably. Given the number of outstanding, average, and mediocre books out there, I resent wasting even a moment of my time reading a truly horrible one.

So, I say to the professionals who reviewed this book: What about the rest of us? It is nice of you to give this young man a little ego boost, but based on your reviews, hundreds of people wasted their valuable time and money. Send me a list of books you liked so I know not to read them!

Yes, this book received quite a bit of hype. Why? Apparently solely because the author was 17 years old when he wrote it. There is no other discernible reason. It reads more like it was written by a 12-year old. What is not mentioned in the blurbs on the book cover is that McDonell's stepfather or godfather is a big publishing honcho. There is, in my mind, no other reason that Joan Didion and Hunter S. Thompson would write positive things about this dreadful book, and no other way it could have been published.

This book is a blatant rip off of "Less than Zero" by Bret Easton Ellis, a much better book written by someone who actually can write. McDonell blatantly copies Ellis' affectless, present tense, first-person narration. If the exercise here was to parody Ellis, then good job. If the effort was to write an original piece of fiction, no luck. Whatever even hints of originality (and there ain't much, believe me) has been lifted totally from Ellis. All McDonell has done is move the setting to New York, and updated some of the pop culture references. The "surprise ending" people speak of can be seen a mile away. If it really does surprise you, then you just aren't paying attention.

This book is self indulgent in the worst way, and there is simply no excuse for something like this to have been published. I am dumbfounded that someone like Joan Didion wrote a positive blurb about this book. Probably blackmail.

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.