Let's hope this is just fiction. However, let's assume McDonell's novel is the canary in the coalmine for today's youth culture. As we learned from Columbine, kids today are capable of unspeakable evil even beyond our worst fears. So maybe Twelve isn't completely fictional, but is a fairly honest look at a new generation of kids who are living in their own Hotel California, and McDonell is their Don Henley, preemptively warning them that they'd better get their shit together or they're going to end up dead, in prison, or in the family way before they even have a chance to be young.
This is a great novel. When I finished it I could not believe a 17-year-old boy wrote it. But when I thought about it, I realized that only a 17-year-old kid could possibly know enough about his or her environment to write something this honest and magnificently detailed without it sounding like it was written by some pseudo-hip adult who hung out with kids, as was the case with Fast Times at Ridgemont High by Cameron Crowe. This is the book all the young Harry Potter fans will read when they start getting zits and pubes and realize something weird and wonderful is happening in their groin areas. Hopefully, they won't want to emulate the characters in this novel but will be horrified by them and get scared straight, if they're not already. I think they will. But I am an optimist.
Article comments
1 - Floyd Garrett
Well, I just didn't get it myself. I absolutely think there is no way this novel would have been published without the connections. I read it the first week it came out--and I tend to shy away from the uber-hyped novels, most of them preordained by that cabal of NYT-Barnes & Borders. . .I found the writing to be the writing of a 17-year-old. I'm sure there are some brilliant writers in that age group. I just don't think he is one of them.
For my money, give me The Lovely Bones, a book that more than lived up to all the hype. Well written and sure to be read years from now, long after Twelve is forgotton.
Just my two. Worth less than that.
Floyd
Wickliffe, OH
2 - bella pezzati
he only wrote about what any person who watches ten minutes of MTV at any given time already knows. there have been countless amounts of works like this that have told us over and over again about the youth of day's impending decadence and whatnot. not as revolutionary as you think.
the book itself can be interesting at times, but mostly boring, and the ending is just pretty unsatisfactory. you end up feeling like, i wasted two and half hours of my life on some spoiled rich kid in Manhatten talking about more spoiled rich kids in Manhatten and their drugs. (that's all it takes to read it, really.)
and it's true, the writing isn't that remarkable either. don't believe the hype. and et cetera.
3 - Mark
URE ALL FULL OF SHIT
4 - Alyssa
ive read the book and its very interesting but kind of what i expected the ending though its very terrible and unexpected...