Twelve

White Mike is clean. He has never smoked a cigarette in his life. Never had a drink, never sucked down a doobie. But White Mike has become a very good drug dealer, even though it started out as a one-shot deal with his cousin Charlie. White Mike was a good student, but he's been out of school for six months, and though some people might wonder what he's doing, no one seams to care very much that he's taking a year off before college. Maybe more than a year.
White Mike lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It is two days after Christmas and all the kids are home from boarding school and everyone has money to blow. So White Mike is busy with a pickup in Harlem and then ounces and fifties and dimes and more round up and down Fifth Avenue for the whole rest of the night.
From the housing projects of Harlem to the penthouses of Park Avenue, Nick McDonell's Twelve is a novel of urban adolescence written by a seventeen-year-old author whose clarity and skill far exceed his years. This is not a coming-of-age story, because the kids of Twelve never had a childhood. Their parents are off on holiday in Bali or business in Brussels, leaving hired help to look the other way as their kids stay home alone in their multimillion-dollar town houses, partying with drugs and sex and, in the end, much worse.