[BFR]⋙ Download Free Twelve Nick McDonnell 9781843540724 Books

Twelve Nick McDonnell 9781843540724 Books

Download As PDF : Twelve Nick McDonnell 9781843540724 Books

Twelve Nick McDonnell 9781843540724 Books

I, for one, tried to like this book, but when I FINALLY finished it, I felt totally disappointed and cheated. I make it a point not to read other people's reviews before I read a book, that way I am not influenced by their thoughts and feelings, whether positive or negative. This is another story with the same plot that we have heard so many times before. It is about rich kids who love to party, do drugs, have unsafe sex, get drunk, and then get violent. I felt really disgusted with the ending.

The only reason I gave this book three stars was that I thought the main character, White Mike, might turn out to have some redeeming value. What did not make sense to me was the fact that White Mike did not smoke, take drugs, or drink. Yet, he was out there getting rich, dealing and destroying young lives, and nobody seemed to care. He was "too clean" to be realistic. As for the writing style, this must be the new acceptable writing style of young novelists today, short, choppy, and terse. If the ending had been different, I might have taken a more positive approach in reviewing this story. Instead, I felt the ending was a cop-out.

I think McDonell could turn out to be a good writer, given another year or two, if he had a more realistic, interesting, or unique story to tell. This is a debut novel, by a very young author, so perhaps his next book will surprise us all!
Joe Hanssen


Tags : Twelve [Nick McDonnell] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Nick McDonell's electrifying novel tells the story of a fictional drug called Twelve and its devastating effects on the beautiful rich and desperate poor of New York City. A bleak Manhattan midwinter and a group of wealthy teenagers,Nick McDonnell,Twelve,Atlantic Books,184354072X,Crime & mystery,Modern fiction,MysterySuspense

Twelve Nick McDonnell 9781843540724 Books Reviews

Fast read with a real punch. A 17-year-old author? Hard to believe. Turned the last page and looked to see what else he's written, but nothing yet. Certainly worth watching.
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.
Twelve" is a very good story especially for the younger generations. I'm 29 and I get how the party's and drugs and status of a person is so important, especially in high school. Nick McDonell has many characters in this book which are entered around this one "White Mike" and the different people he sells to and his points of view on the world and environment in which he was raised. Hold on tight for this one and try to read it in a few sittings because there is so much going on and many characters. Also try the movie. It's very good but not as good as this book... as usual
Brilliant novel and a super quick read. I read it in a day which caught the attention of my high school English students who keep track of how often we're on to new independent reading novels. Many of them then read it themselves…also in a day or two and then RAVED about how much they loved it. It is now totally worn and torn and taped together and they're still passing it around, wishing there were more books out there like this. I highly recommend it.
I, for one, tried to like this book, but when I FINALLY finished it, I felt totally disappointed and cheated. I make it a point not to read other people's reviews before I read a book, that way I am not influenced by their thoughts and feelings, whether positive or negative. This is another story with the same plot that we have heard so many times before. It is about rich kids who love to party, do drugs, have unsafe sex, get drunk, and then get violent. I felt really disgusted with the ending.

The only reason I gave this book three stars was that I thought the main character, White Mike, might turn out to have some redeeming value. What did not make sense to me was the fact that White Mike did not smoke, take drugs, or drink. Yet, he was out there getting rich, dealing and destroying young lives, and nobody seemed to care. He was "too clean" to be realistic. As for the writing style, this must be the new acceptable writing style of young novelists today, short, choppy, and terse. If the ending had been different, I might have taken a more positive approach in reviewing this story. Instead, I felt the ending was a cop-out.

I think McDonell could turn out to be a good writer, given another year or two, if he had a more realistic, interesting, or unique story to tell. This is a debut novel, by a very young author, so perhaps his next book will surprise us all!
Joe Hanssen