Book – Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident
Author – Eoin Colfer
Year – 2001
Genre – Fantasy
Pages – 288
Series – Artemis Fowl
The last of the books in this little flurry of reviews that I have put up today is the follow up to the previous book. I usually try not to read two books in the same series one after another – I like to mix things up a little – but I was pretty excited to get a start on the second one here, and decided that as I have failed on this front several times in the past, it couldn’t hurt to do so once more.
The same characters are there – Fowl, Holly, Root and Fowl’s butler, Butler (this seemingly unimaginative coincidence is explained nicely in the book, but you can read it to find out), but this time they are working together in a compound plot that involves the rescue of Artemis’ presumed dead father from the Arctic, and a goblin rebellion below the ground. I have read somewhere that Colfer describes his Artemis Fowl series as “Die Hard with fairies” and this is a concept that I can get behind entirely. There is a sense of action that is interspersed with both fantasy and humour that makes this series incredibly readable. I mentioned in the last review about how there will always be parallels between any fantasy book with a young male protagonist, and Harry Potter. I probably should have mentioned however, just how different these books are, whilst simultaneously being exactly the right kind of thing for each other’s markets.
The best thing is that this is a series of eight books, so I still have another six to look forward to. Shall start gathering together my Christmas pennies…
9/10