The Descendants - A Novel

Kaui Hart Hemmings

Random House

2011

283 páginas

9h 26m

ISBN-13: 9780099570240

A descendant of one of Hawaii's largest landowners, Matt King finds his luck changed when his fun-loving, flighty wife Joanie falls into a coma, victim of a boating accident. Matt is left in sole charge of his two daughters, teenage ex-model and recovering drug addict Alex, and Scootie, a feisty ten-year-old. And then Matt discovers Joanie has been having an affair. Deciding to seek out Joanie's lover so that he too has a chance to say his goodbyes, Matt takes to the road with his daughters on a memorable journey of painful revelations and unexpected humour...

Resenhas (1)

5 (Perfeito)

O livro que eu mais gostei até agora em 2013

Eu fiz essa resenha para uma redação do inglês, e decidi postar aqui, com algumas adaptações. Desculpem não traduzir :/

The summary is: Matt King inherited a lot of land in Hawaii, because he is one of the descendants of a missionary that, a long time ago, married a Hawaiian princess, so now he's one of the biggest landowners of Hawaii. The descendants have to sell it for two reasons: need of money and, after all, they weren't doing anything with the land. He has the biggest say, so it's a lot of pressure, worsened by the coma of his wife, caused by a boat accident. Despite all these problems, he also has to deal with his two problematic daughters. The youngest is Scottie, a ten-year-old girl that lies a lot and has a really nasty, unbearable friend. The other daughter is 18-year-old Alex; she used to be a drug addict, reason why in the beginning of the story she was in a boarding school. Now Matt is in charge and he's rather lost with this. Then, he discovers his wife was cheating on him, which confuses him: he is sad and mad at his wife, but he doesn't want to feel like this, he wants to make her happy in her final days. When the doctor says his wife (which by the way is called Joanie) will not wake up, he starts visiting their closest friends and family to let them know and invite them to give their goodbyes. Also, he finds himself in a dilemma: should he tell the man Joanie was seeing that his lover was going to die? Was that what Joanie would want, the lover instead of the husband? Well, these are the main points of the novel, from where the story is going to develop.

The book is now one of my favorites. You cheer for the characters, you laugh with them, you get confused with them. They come to life, there's a connection. For example, when Matt asks a couple of friends if they knew about the cheating, if they knew who the man was, the woman blames him, saying that Joanie was right, that Matt wasn't good with her, and I got so mad at this. I mean, he never thought something was wrong, he thought she liked the way things were, he loved her. I took Matt's side, and if you take a character's side it's because the book is really good, right? Another example of how good the book is: once I almost missed the bus stop I was supposed to get down because I was paying so much attention to the reading.

The only two things that in some parts of the reading bugged me a little bit were: I couldn't believe that a 10-year-old could be like Scottie, so smart, cunning, and sometimes even malicious, and I don't know what else that made me have to remind myself that she was ten, not thirteen; and second thing is, I couldn't believe that a father would concern so little about having a drug-addict daughter, would pay so little attention to this. Well, by the end of the book, these problems I had were solved, partly because I realised my point of view was wrong, partly because the story made me believe they could be real people. With Scottie, for example, how hard would it be to have your mother in a coma and a sister that gets drunk and does drugs? And about Matt, you see how he feels he failed his wife, his daughters...

There's one more character that I should mention: Sid, Alex's friend. Well, at least that's what they say they are, just friends. Alex claims that she would be more "civil" with him around, but it turns out that it's more than that, Sid has also a personal dilemma. A charming, fun character.

Something that really surprised me was seeing that this book is not very popular, at least here in Brazil, which is a shame, because it's a really good and worth-reading story. I didn't even know that that film was based on a novel.

The Descendants is a really good book. You will be delighted to see the development of the characters and how the author treats such serious issues in a light and sometimes even fun way. You'll be surprised with the course of this homogeneous story.