Twelve is Nick McDonell‘s debut novel. It was recently made into a movie.

Plot:
White Mike is 17, good-looking, rich and very intelligent. He decided to take a year off between high school and college and spends it dealing drugs to rich kids. But in the days before New Year’s everything seems to fall apart.

Twelve is a good book, made even more impressive by the fact that Nick McDonell was only 17 himself when he wrote it. But its author’s age is not the only thing that commends it.

I bought this book about five years ago and never got around to reading it. Now that the movie came out, I decided that that was the needed kick in the ass to finally read it. It will be interesting to see how they adapted the structure of the book, which is written entirely in short chapters and jumping wildly between the people it follows (though White Mike is the central character). Since it’s a Joel Schuhmaker film though, I’m guessing they just made a straight-forward story of it and didn’t bother with the structure.

Anyway, back to the book.

It’s very well-written, with passages like (that I quite liked):

So you are born in the capital of the world and you can never escape and that’s how it is because that’s how everyone wants it to be. It is all about want. No one needs anything here. It is about when you wake up in the morning and the snow is already coming down and it is bright between the buildings where the sun falls but already dark where the shadows are, and it is all about want. What do you want? Because if you don’t want something, you’ve got nothing. You are adrift, you are washed away, and then buried under the snow and the shadows. And when, in the spring, the snow melts, no one will remember where you were frozen and buried, and you will no longer be anywhere.

or (that I liked even more):

He looks out over the gray water for another minute; while the waves break and foam on the shore, he notes that the farther out he looks, the calmer it gets, until it is just a solid gray line. The horizon doesn’t move.

This passages might not be to everyone’s taste and I myself thought that a few of them felt a little forced in the “now I’m being symbolic, geddit?” way, but they all contribute nicely to the general feel of the book.

White Mike is an interesting character and McDonell manages that we can still identify with (and like) him, even though he’s a world-weary 17-year-old boy – a species that easily annoys the hell out of me.

On a minor sidenote: It’s amazing how dated the technology feels already. The book takes place 10 years ago and there’s beepers and bareyl any cell phones and it seems wrong…

Summarising: It’s a quick, engaging read that won’t surprise you with its inevitable ending but you’ll still want to finish it anyway.