Synopsis
A chilling portrait of urban adolescence focuses on the life and times of White Mike, a seventeen-year-old prep-school dropout and drug dealer, and his privileged peers, who spend their time partying with sex, drugs, and escalating violence in the pursuit of ever more exotic and dangerous thrills. A first novel. 40,000 first printing.
Reviews
"White Mike" dresses in an overcoat and lives with his dad on Manhattan's Upper East Side (his mom died of breast cancer not too long ago). The 17-year-old doesn't smoke, doesn't drink and doesn't do drugs. He dropped out of high school and now sells drugs pot and an Ecstasy-like upper called "twelve" to the city's moneyed teens. In this shocker of a first novel, McDonell who was 17 when he wrote it carries readers through White Mike's frantically spinning world, one alternately peopled with obscenely wealthy teenagers who live in gated townhouses with parents rarely in town and FUBU-clad basketball players in Harlem. In terse, controlled prose, McDonell describes five days in White Mike's life during Christmas break. He introduces a host of characters, ranging from Sara Ludlow ("the hottest girl at her school by, like, a lot") to Lionel ("a creepy dude" with "brown and yellow bloodshot eyes" who also sells drugs), writing mainly in the present tense, but sometimes flashing back in italics. His prose darts from one scene and character to the next, much like a cab zipping down city streets, halting quickly at a red light and then accelerating madly as soon as the light turns green. And although it brims with New York references e.g., the MetLife Building and Lenox Hill Hospital this is really a story about excess and its effects. The final scene, at a raging New Year's Eve party, will leave readers stunned, as well as curious as to what might come next from this precocious writer.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Twelve is a drug, like the best drug ever, and it's going to be at Chris' New Year's Eve bash. Everyone who's anyone in the world of rich prep-school kids will be there, from Mark Rothko, who talks like Snoop Dogg and got his nickname by pushing a fellow student into a Mark Rothko painting on a class trip, to Sara, the object of every guy's lust. Even White Mike, the drug-dealing protagonist of this first novel, ends up making an appearance, although he doesn't do drugs or drink. In brief, interconnected vignettes, the story follows White Mike and his acquaintances for one week of Christmas vacation. Written by a 17-year-old high-school student, this novel is a Less than Zero for a new generation of disenfranchised rich kids, except it's not quite as good. The young author sometimes relies on stereotypes to characterize adults, and the book's climactic scene is gratuitously violent. But the sparse, fiercely unsentimental prose and the stark hopelessness of the teenage characters make the book a surprisingly engrossing read. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Authors keep getting younger; this one is only 17 and a student at a private high school in New York. Predictably, he goes after the spoiled rich kids who are going after the newest drug in town, called twelve. Let's hope that this acquisition was inspired not by sensationalism but by good writing.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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