So, Disney Channel, you want to take the premise of Once Upon a Time and High School Musical, mash them together, and make a new fandom? Well, sure, it's still better than 90% of everything else on the Disney Channel right now, so why not? But you ARE still shooting yourself in the foot by not deciding if you want it to be taken seriously or as a parody in-universe. 
 And with such a frame of mind, I watched Descendants. It wasn't a bad movie, really; entertaining enough to make me want to spend a little more time with the characters at any rate, so I checked out the prequel novel. 
 And let me say straight out, while it's a solid, likable fandom, it does have its faults and plotholes that, while I probably couldn't drive a truck through them, I could definitely make passes on a Segway. 
 The novel fixes two of the film's problems: (1) the cartoonish stupidity of the parents of these "evil" children as seen in the movie, and (2) budget issues by including things the Disney Channel can't afford the needed CGI to show. But it also creates more problems in that the ONLY thing it has making it different from the billion other "sassy fairy-tale for Junior High Grade" novels out there is Disney brand name dropping. 
 It's a LOT of fun to see all the little cameos in this (Gaston's sons, for example, are hysterical to envision as shown in this book) but the main story, being a prequel to the ACTUAL story that launched the fandom (aka the movie) is fairly weak. The author did WONDERFULLY with what she was given, and her style was VERY, VERY good, BUT she did have to resort to constant audience nudges, making the novel overly self-aware to the point where I was like "Geez, lady, poke a little harder at the fourth wall, why don't you? Let's see if you can actually BREAK it, or punch a hole through it like Carlos got a hole in the magical dome..."! 
 That said, its nice to have some background on how all these characters became friends and got to where they were at the start of the movie. 
 Overall, if I had a child, I'd MUCH rather them read this than Rick Riordan's recent writing (pretty much anything following Son of Neptune which was the last book of his I enjoyed), but it wasn't everything I personally hoped it would be. 
 Fun fandom, decent book, but nothing I'd run out to buy.