Return to the Isle of the Lost (Descendants Series #2)

by Melissa de la Cruz

Overview

The sequel to the #1 New York Times best seller The Isle of the Lost


Mal's an expert at intimidating her enemies, but she’s broken the habit since leaving her villainous roots behind. So when she and her friends Evie, Carlos, and Jay all receive threatening messages demanding they return home, Mal can’t believe it. Sure, she’s King Ben’s girlfriend now, and she’s usually nice to her classmates, but she still didn’t think anyone would be silly enough to try to push her around.

The thing is, it kind of worked. Especially since she and her friends have a sneaking suspicion that their villainous parents are behind the messages. And when Evie looks into her Magic Mirror, what she sees only confirms their fears. Maleficent’s just a tiny lizard after her run-in with Mal at Ben’s Coronation, but she’s the worst villain in the land for a reason. Could she have found a way to escape? Whatever’s going on, Mal, Evie, Carlos, and Jay know they have to sneak back to the Isle and get to the bottom of it.

Without its infamous leader, the island’s even worse than when they left it, but the comforts of home—even a home as gloomy as the Isle of the Lost—can be hard to resist for recently reformed villains. Will the kids be able to beat the evil bubbling at the Isle’s wicked core, or will the plot to destroy Auradon succeed?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781484750711
Publisher:	Disney - RHCB
Publication date:	05/24/2016
Series:	Disney's Descendants Series
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.20(d)
Lexile:	820L (what's this?)
Age Range:	9 - 12 Years

About the Author

Melissa de la Cruz is the #1 New York Times, #1 Publisher’s Weekly and #1 IndieBound bestselling author of many critically acclaimed and award-winning novels for readers of all ages. Her books have topped USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times bestseller lists and been published in more than twenty countries. She is best-known for her Blue Bloods series (with more than three million copies in print), The Descendants books based on the Disney Channel films, and the Witches of East End novels, which were turned into a two-season drama series on Lifetime Television. Melissa de la Cruz lives in West Hollywood with her husband and daughter.

Editorial Reviews

"Packed with plenty of humor and adventure, this sequel spinoff is destined to please. With a second movie in the works and a bevy of loyal readers, it certainly won’t stay on shelves for long."—Booklist

From the Publisher

2016-06-22
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)

Kirkus Reviews