Likely, like its predecessor, to be a fixture on bestseller lists—but not for its imaginative or literary qualities.
Ominous portents in Auradon send the offspring of four Disney villains home—to discover that their evil parents have disappeared.
De la Cruz picks up the plotline roughly where it left off at the end of the 2015 TV film Descendants. Spurred by mysteriously delivered threats and also the discovery of an Anti-Heroes Club posting to a surreptitious Dark Web, Mal, Evie, Jay, and Carlos (more-or-less reformed children of, respectively, Maleficent, Snow White’s Evil Queen, Jafar, and Cruella de Vil) steal away from Auradon Prep’s Castlecoming dance to check out their old haunts in the villains’ island enclave. From there, events dissolve into a confused tangle. After much buildup, the supposedly hostile club turns out to be composed of worshipful groupies (who explain at length how “anti-heroes” are actually cool). A message that the vanished ’rents have collected talismans that will magnify their evil powers sends the four teens in pursuit—to encounter a monster with “huge fanged teeth” and find, confusingly, that the talismans are somehow still in place and ready to be gathered up. A familiar purple dragon laying waste to Camelot’s suburbs turns out, anticlimactically, not to be Maleficent but another, much more easily overcome shape-changer. Even the characters know all this is phoned in: “What are we going to do,” says Carlos, “when they tell us what their evil plan is?” The continued absence of the grown-up baddies, plus a spate of earthquakes and violent weather, remains to be resolved in future sequels.
Likely, like its predecessor, to be a fixture on bestseller lists—but not for its imaginative or literary qualities. (Fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4847-5071-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel.
Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.
Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-17534-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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BOOK REVIEW
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