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The Descendants
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#UC0262
Paperback, 297 pages; 2008 (2007)
$14.00
 Members' Price: $11.90
For all of the tragedy and melodrama inherent in the plot, The Descendants manages to be deceptively lighthearted, surprisingly suspenseful, and even downright hilarious. Matt King, a middle-aged attorney in Honolulu and a descendant of Hawaiian royalty, learns his comatose wife, Joanie, will not recover from a boating accident, so he gathers her loved ones to say their final farewells. In the midst of the turmoil and grief, Matt discovers that Joanie had been having an affair and was planning to leave him. Impulsively, he prolongs his wife's life-support in order to give her lover a chance to say good-bye. He gathers his two daughters—a precocious ten-year-old and a formerly drug-addicted seventeen-year-old—and the dysfunctional trio embarks for Kauai, where Joanie's lover is said to be vacationing. Matt's harebrained scheme to find him results in laughable misadventures as well as poignantly tender epiphanies. Well-intentioned despite his questionable parenting practices and his somewhat neurotic tendencies, Matt King is a reluctant hero of the most likable sort.
(AG)
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