Under the Sea: A Descendants Story (Descendants 3): Promo (HD)

Here's a promo for the upcoming third Descendants movie, Under the Sea: A Descendants Story.





Related Post:Book Review: The Isle of the Lost: A Descendants Novel byMelissa de la Cruz

The Lunar Chronicles: Brace yourselves, Everybody! It’s time to explore the mind and past of Queen Levana (My thoughts on Fairest: Levana’s Story by Marissa Meyer)

Right off the bat, I have to say that while I’ve absolutely loved the Lunar Chronicles so far, Fairest: Levana’s Story is definitely my least favorite book in the series. For the record, I still have to read Winter, so that opinion may change. As I said in my review for Cress, I was really hoping that this book would give Levana some depth and complexity, both as a villain and as a character in general. To be fair, I do think that this book gave Levana some complexity and depth, but unfortunately it didn’t give her too much of those things, which as a result, greatly hindered my enjoyment of Fairest.

The biggest problem that I have with Fairest is the fact that right from the beginning of the book, Levana comes across as being so self-centered, unlikable and evil that it was extremely hard for me to get emotionally invested in Levana as a character and care about her, or get invested in what was happening throughout the book. While the Lunar Chronicles series as a whole has made me think about the TV show Once Upon a Time a lot, as well as the show Grimm, since they’re both shows that involve reimagining fairy tales; Fairest reminded me a lot of the season one episode of Once Upon a Time, “The Stable Boy” where the backstory behind Regina’s hatred for Snow White was revealed. I pretty much had the same problems with this book as I did with that episode of Once Upon a Time. The reveal of what happened to make Regina hate Snow White so much ended up being incredibly disappointing, and it was honestly rather difficult to go along with the idea that Regina was justified in blaming Snow White for the death of Daniel, who was the man that she loved and wanted to marry when it was her mother, Cora, who had actually killed Daniel. While I wasn’t crazy about the explanation as to why Regina hated Snow White so much and wanted to get revenge on her, I was still able to have at least some sympathy for Regina. Plus, I thought that Regina had plenty of depth to her at that point in the series. Levana, on the other hand, lacks depth and is constantly acting so coldhearted, self-centered and flat-out evil throughout the book, that the reader is never really given a chance to feel all that sorry for Levana or truly like her.

I get that Levana’s sister, Channary, was physically and emotionally abusive towards her and is responsible for the scars that she has on her face, but that doesn’t automatically mean that the reader is going to feel sympathetic towards Levana; because the things that Levana does in this book that don’t involve Channary in any way are pretty horrible. I can’t help but wonder if Meyer was trying to portray Levana as a sympathetic villain in this book. However, the thing I think people need to remember is that there’s a big difference between a character having a sympathetic backstory and actually being a sympathetic character. 

Descendants: So, does the rotten apple fall far from the tree? (My thoughts on The Isle of the Lost by Melissa de la Cruz)

Let me start out by saying that I wasn’t originally planning to read and review The Isle of the Lost by Melissa de la Cruz at this point in time. However, since the Disney channel original movie Descendants just aired, I decided to binge read The Isle of the Lost since it serves as a prequel to the movie; that being said, here are my thoughts on the book.

Right off the bat, I have to say that I really liked this book, and it definitely serves as great set-up for the movie since the book ends right where the movie begins with Ben deciding to let Mal, Evie, Jay and Carlos out of the Isle of the Lost and come to Auradon, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Given the fact that Mal is the daughter of Maleficent, Evie is the Evil Queen’s daughter, Jay is Jafar’s son, and Carlos is the son of Cruella De Vil, this book really reminded me of the TV show Once Upon a Time since the show really plays around with famous characters from various fairytales, as well as other books like this book does. Once Upon a Time has even featured Maleficent, the Evil Queen and Cruella De Vil. However, both this book and the movie Descendants is obviously doing its own thing with the characters just like Once Upon a Time has also done its own thing with fairytale characters throughout the course of the show’s run.

The overall tone of the book and the fact that the characters seem to view things that in the real world are typically considered bad behavior and bad emotions as being good in their minds and things that are considered good behavior and positive emotions as being wrong really made me think a lot about the book series A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket and how those books are kind of depressing in a very comical way. The fact that the overall tone of this book felt very reminiscent of A Series of Unfortunate Events is definitely one of the things that I liked the most about this book.

However, while overall tone of the book reminded me a lot of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the way their school and their classes were described reminded me a lot of the Harry Potter books and the classes that the characters took at Hogwarts.

While I really liked all of the characters in the book, Carlos was definitely my favorite character. Despite the fact that all of the characters in the book were raised to be evil, I feel like the parts with Carlos had the most heart and were at times kind of sad, especially whenever Carlos would talk to the others about what it was like to have Cruella De Vil for a mother.