The Lost Colony

I finally got around to finishing off this addition to the Artemis Fowl series, and I must say The Lost Colony keeps up the tradition: a non-stop action story.

Seriously, Eoin Colfer knows how to drop you right into the action at sixty miles per hour and keeps the foot on the gas until the finish line is crossed. He does not waste any time on chapters of boring filler to catch you up to the latest doings of his characters. Instead he joins a subplot right in the middle and dishes out the details as they are needed. Of course, being books aimed at kids I suspect that is intentional since boring slow chapters would lose his audience.

Anyway… this story deals with the lost 8th race of the fairies, demons. Ten thousand years ago, after losing a war with humans when none of the other fairy races would support them, the demons’ warlocks cast a spell a ripped the entire demon island, Hybras, right out of time and sent it into Limbo where they would stay and maybe return when they could defeat the humans. Only, the spell didn’t work right for some reason, the warlocks all died, and Hybras got stuck out of time, but the spell is decaying and demons occasionally get dragged back through time, show up briefly and then vanish, some return, some lost forever. Artemis, who reverse hacked the fairies and found out some details on the time spell, has calculated that the spell is near failing completely which will send Hybras crashing into Now, which will expose the fairies to the world.

And we can’t have that… so the usual suspects are rounded up and head off to figure out how to stop it from failing, or maybe just make it fail in a controlled manner.

Like the other Artemis Fowl books, I enjoyed it. It was a fun quick read, funny and exciting. Good, I think, for kids, and not so bad for adults either.

The Wish List

I really enjoyed the Artemis Fowl books by Eoin Colfer, so when I browsing through Barnes & Nobles’ “Books under $3” deal a few months back, I picked up The Wish List for $1.

The basic plot is this: a girl, who was in the midst of being bad after having done a number of bad things in her life, dies after doing something good, which winds up with her having a fifty-fifty read on the good-evil-ometer. So since neither Heaven nor Hell can take her just yet, she is allowed to go back to Earth and help out someone who needs help. If she succeeds, she goes to heaven; if she fails, she goes to hell. And while Heaven agrees to let her make her own way, Hell cheats and sends someone to stop her… the spirit of the man who did her in. When she gets to Earth, two years have past and she ends up having to help a man complete some items of his wish list before he shuffles off to the afterlife himself.

Okay, so its not so basic. But it was a good read. I thoroughly enjoyed the tale as she, Meg, deals with the man she has to help. I guess with this book Mr. Colfer hops over on to my “good author” list, which means if I see his name, I’ll probably enjoy it.

Artemis Fowl

I had heard good things about the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer, so I put them on my birthday wish list last year. As it happens, I got one. I actually read Artemis Fowl, the first book in the series, a couple of months ago. And it was good enough that I bought the next two, The Arctic Incident and The Eternity Code. This series is fun, extremely well written, and if not for the lack of real violence or dead and the repeated appearance by a character who uses flatualance to get things done you might mistake them for “adult” books.

The recommended reader level of these books is grades 5-7, but I’d recommend them to just about anyone. The plot runs like this… Artemis Fowl is an eleven year old boy genius, son to the head of a long standing crime family. His father, trying to do some legit business may have gotten himself killed, at the very least he’s gone missing in action. In the meantime, Artemis has been running the family business, along with the help of his bodyguard, Butler. Artemis stumbles upon fairies. It turns out they exist, but its not exactly like the story books. There are no leprechauns… instead, you’ve got the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance, LEP Recon. And other things are different too, but one thing remains, if you can trick them out of their gold, its yours to keep. The family funds have dried up, and Artemis puts into action a plan to win himself some fairy gold. The first book goes from there, and later books deal with Artemis and the People (as the fairies call themselves) and their ever crossing paths.

This series gets my gold seal of approval. Its a good, fast, fun read.