You can definitely tell this is a middle grade book, but I did quite enjoy parts of it. Mentions of the villains made me nostalgic (in a good way!) for the movies I grew up on. Overall I did enjoy the book even if I did find it juvenile (which isn't a bad thing!). I would probably read it again. A good prequel to the movie. 3.75 out of 5 stars. ( )

To enjoy this book you have to turn off your brain for a second. All the Disney villains, heroes, and heroines exist in the same time and in the same universe(their kingdoms are also beside one another somehow, whoop). It's magic, roll with it. Thus we have different time-era characters such as Aladdin, Kuzco, Beast, Mulan, etc existing alongside one another. As I said, roll with it, history buffs are screaming as they read this, I know.
All of the bad guys have been defeated and sent to an island to serve time and reform themselves with no help. There, they are left with nothing to do but procreate and spend their yarns about how evil they are. This isn't a joke you have been warned.

It really shows in this book just how narcissistic most of these villains are, and it's a great depiction of narcissism you have things like Cruella DeVille names her son Carlos, Maleficent names her daughter Mal, Jafar names his son Jay, if you're not seeing it yet I'll spell it out for you, all of them name their kids after themselves as a true narcissist would. Or they really have no thoughts or ideas on wtf a name is, or how to come up with one. None is worse than Gaston naming his twin sons Gaston Jr and Gaston the third. That is some amazing narcissism.

It is hilarious having two chatty characters both be named Gaston, though. Worse is any scene with the twins AND their father. Three Gastons is too many.

I'd like to say that the heroes name their kids something better, but a lot of them don't. And the whole read, I can't imagine Beast as anything other than the animal. They all refer to him as King Beast because I guess they all forgot that his actual name in the movie at the end is Adam. So the entire read you're going to hear King Beast and think oh he's still a furry animal for some reason. Which makes the fact they had kids even weirder, almost sounds like a furry thing.

With names like Ben for Belle and Beast's kid, I know that the bad naming system isn't just relegated to the villains.

Now here comes my main complaint, the main thing that hinders all of the stories(as this is both a book, a show, and a movie series) and really doesn't make sense.
I'm very late to delving deeper into the series beyond a few catchy songs, so this is probably gone over a million times by everyone else but I'm going to say it anyway.
The villains are left on an island that the heroes know exists and the heroes know they're there, the heroes are seemingly aware that the villains had kids, but they don't do anything about that. To punish the kids in the same way as the villains is just going to breed malcontentment, there is no reason that Jay nor Mal nor Carlos deserve the same punishment as their parents who actually did crimes, all are minors in this book. And yet our good heroic saviors are expecting multiple children of their enemies to survive on moldy bread rotten apples and occasionally not watered down or black coffee. I'm not even going to get into the topic of the fact these children address awful tendencies. They talk about how they regularly drank coffee while growing up, and that's so bad for them at those ages.

This sounds like something that they would have foreseen and they should have taken the children away and raised them as their own or put them up for adoption. There's no one in this world who could say Cruella DeVille would be a good mother, in fact throughout the book we are hinted at that she keeps her child in a dog cage and makes him bark. Which is so many layers of wrong. I'm not even going to get into the parentage of most of these kids because we're just going to let that slide. Because if I sat here and talked about how illogical it is some of these guys reproduced it all I'd be splitting hairs. Cruella is obviously way older than she should be to have kids for one.

I don't find the story as it is, outside the above problem with the fact that the heroes do nothing for these abused kids, to be a bad story. The story itself is very simple it's very much a Disney story. We have good kids and bad kids and not all the bad kids are actually bad. Despite both of their upbringings, they have ideas and a mind of their own. I think that they should have been checked on and they should have been rescued but I'm going to be beating a dead horse if I say that every time.

Because they're all children, even if they are teenagers, you can really get a sense of how isolated, they are how sheltered they are, and how they don't know anything about the world. As for the villains, they know only what they've been told and nothing else, they're trapped in a dome and their kids are trapped in a dome too. The hero's way of getting them to be good is to just broadcast the repeated same sentences over and over and over. Which, even as an adult I can tell you if somebody repeated the same line of "be good. do good" fifty times a day I would probably become a villain myself in a year or less. That kind of forcefeeding doesn't do anything but breed rebellion.

I find Mal to be just the right amount of edgy and goth, to be a relatable character but also very out there. I don't really find myself as a reader caring about her or what happens to her a lot, but while others will kind of meander in a circle, Mal and Evie progressed the story. And for that, I like them more than I expected to.

This is a relatively harmless book with some very ridiculous sentences and some utterly hilarious scenes. But I can definitely say it's worth a read.

3.5 Stars. ( )

Read this when I was younger, I'm sorely tempted to reread it now a few years later to see if my thoughts change.
I remember really enjoying the movies, particularly Descendents 1.
( )

Surprisingly, I like this more than the first movie. It's not necessary a page-turner but still a fun and magical read. ( )

Didn’t you know? Villains have kids too.

Twenty years ago when Belle married her Beast they rounded up all the villains and banished them… to the Isle of the Lost. During their banishment these notorious villains have been raising their young, preparing them for the day when they’d escape the magic dome allowing them to finally get their revenge.

This book, being the prequel to the 2015 hit TV movie Disney Descendants, introduces us to the four main villain children – Mal, Evie, Jay and Carlos – and gives us a glimpse of what their life was like before the movie. The food is rotten, the houses are shoddy and the parent-child relationships are nothing like the ones in Auradon. What do you expect? They’re villains and they pretty much only see their children as a way to carry on their evil legacies… assuming they get off the island eventually.

The book also gives us a glimpse of Prince Ben in Auradon and his training to becoming King once he turns sixteen. There are not many chapters dedicated to his character, but we do get to see in which ways he takes after his parents, King Beast and Queen Belle.

Meanwhile, on the isle Mal is given an assignment from her mother (Maleficent) to retrieve her treasured scepter, which holds the Dragon Eye, from the other side of the island. However, there’s a catch – the eye is cursed. The first person to touch it and ‘wake the dragon’ will be cursed to sleep for a thousand years (classic Maleficent). Enlisting the help of her three acquaintances (because villains don’t have friends) Mal conducts a plan that will help them retrieve the eye and she’ll be able to prove once and for all that she is as evil as her mother.

So… this book is definitely a great read. I like that we get to see more into the lives of the villain children before they go to Auradon in the movie. However, there are some differences between the book and movie that irk me a little, but isn’t that always the case?

First of all, the villain children are not as close in the book as they make them out to be in the movie, and neither are the parents. In the book we learn that Mal hates Evie for an incident that happened when they were six, and just as well their parents, Evil Queen and Maleficent aren’t exactly fond of each other. In the movie, it’s completely opposite. It seems as though EQ and Maleficent are best friends, along with Jafar and Cruella De Vil.

Now that I think about it, that’s really the only thing that bugs me between the book and movie.

I guess it works out though, because during their quest to find the Dragon Eye we see the four villains-in-training doing something they never thought possible – bond.

In any case, if you are at all interested in reading about the children of some of the most famous villains I’d definitely recommend this book… and the movies of course. It’s up to you of course whether you want to read the book first or see the movie, since you don’t necessarily need to read the book before watching the movie. ( )