Paradise Lost By kaytidawg on Jan 23, 2008 - Updated Oct 15, 2011

The Descendants is a rather depressing tale of loss. It tells the story of a family living in Hawaii. The mother is in a coma with little hope of recovery following a boating accident, and in many ways she was separated from the family emotionally even before she got hurt.

The father tries to hold the family together, including his two daughters, Scottie (a needy 10-year-old) and Alex (an aloof teenager and former drug addict). Just like his daughters, he has a lot of growing up to do. He decides that the only way to really let his wife go is to pay a visit to the man with whom she was having an affair. So they make the trek to find him.

Things do not turn out exactly as expected, but I still found the book to be pretty dry. So much so that by the end of the book, I didn't really care what happened.

My overall impression of this book was that it was boring. In fact, I doubt I would have finished it if I hadn't been asked to write a review of it for a magazine. I felt like it took forever to get to the climax of the story, and then, much to my disappointment, it turned out to be anticlimactic. I did enjoy the paragraphs describing Hawaii though, although they didn't add much to the overall story.