Descendants (Hemmings) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The narrator of this audaciously comic debut novel, the scion of the last Hawaiian landowning clan, has floated through his privileged life: marriage to a model given to "speedboats, motorcycles, alcoholism"; children getting into trouble (cocaine, bullying) at elite schools; membership at a century-old beach club that rejects those with "unfavorable pedigrees." But when a catamaran accident leaves his wife in a coma he must wake from his own "prolonged unconsciousness," reacquaint himself with his neglected daughters, and track down his wife’s lover. Meanwhile, his cousins are urging him to sell the family’s vast landholdings for development—to relinquish, in his eyes, the final vestige of their native Hawaiian ancestry. Hemmings channels the voice of her befuddled middle-aged hero with virtuosity, as he teeters between acerbic and sentimental, scoffing at himself even as he grasps for redemption.
The New Yorker


[B]ittersweet.... Matt's journey with his girls forms the emotional core of this sharply observed, frequently hilarious and intermittently heartbreaking look at a well-meaning but confused father trying to hold together his unconventional family.
Publishers Weekly


As smart, perceptive, and evocative as Hemmings' premiere literary offering was, (the superlative short story collection House of Thieves, 2005), her irresistible debut novel is light years beyond.... Evincing a sublimely mature style and beguiling command of theme and setting, Hemmings' virtuoso performance offers a piquantly tender and winsomely comic portrait of a singular family's revealing response to tragedy. —Carol Haggas
Booklist


Hemming's first novel expands on a short story...about a self-consciously privileged Hawaiian family in crisis.... Hemmings pulls off a remarkable feat in making the Kings' sense of loss all the more wrenching for being directed at a woman who was neither a good wife nor a good mother.
Kirkus Reviews