STOP PRESS - Lost Colony Found to be Brilliant (Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony)

Member Name: theediscerning

Product:	Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony
Date:	19/12/07 (58 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Everything we have come to know and love in a new story

Disadvantages: Practically none

Artemis Fowl, the best fourteen year old in the world when it comes to both interfering with and saving the very existence of the world of Fairy, has got it hard in this, his fourth full-length adventure.

He has a female rival, of similar age.

And he at last has puberty - affecting his brains, slowing his thought processes, diverting his attentions.

But the world of Fairy needs to call on the boy from Ireland they have hated to love and loved to hate before now to save them.

When the worlds of Fairy and humankind (or Mud Men as those below call us) separated, the demon island of Hybras was moved by the magical inhabitants to an elsewhen that has kept them safe for many a century. But now, the margins are breaking, and demons are reaching our known world - Barcelona, Sicily, etc.

The Fairy world must rely, as usual, on Foaly, the technologically masterminded police expert, and Holly Short, recently sacked as field agent to become a private eye, and their grudging use of Artemis Fowl's genius to keep demons happy - and away from everyone.

Now it's clear what Eoin Colfer has to go through to try and make this stuff sound convincing...

And convincing it all is - from the rather gruesome biology of the demon (which starts out as imp, like our sad new star character Imp #1, who is the oldest and saddest imp, and who just cannot find it within himself for some reason to transform into an angry, scaly, venomous demon) to the globe-trotting settings used (Malaysia is added to the European locales mentioned earlier, and Siberian wastes as seen in the second book in the series).

All the Artemis Fowl books are self-contained, but there are enough tiny clues at the beginning of this one to make you want to go back and read the rest. All the regular characters are back, like the heroic Butler - Artemis's superlative bodyguard, and Mulch Diggums, the disgusting dwarf with his unique brand of toilet humour - and toilet action.

The use of a school-aged boy with excellent skills in interacting with the unseen world is not alone in the book world, and indeed the gags about Artemis's hitting puberty in this volume might have been influenced by Harry Potter gossip. But although the Rowling books have broken all records, Fowl is still a huge hit - and deservedly so.

The series certainly drags theed to the local library every time a new adventure is released. There's something in it that appeals to the teenager in him - and there is an awful lot in the Fowl books to appeal to many teenagers.

There's the mix of technology with the fantasy species uses - didn't you realise Foaly is a centaur? There's the rivetting action, which is superbly paced throughout - although perhaps here the small jumps back in time to see events from a second viewpoint get more common, yet might well confuse the less experienced reader. And there is the lavatorial Diggums, which is the only rankle with the series possible from the parental viewpoint.

The cinematic scope of the cycle of stories is only added to here with the high action, time-bending finale. It's clearly not the last of the Fowl books we can expect. But for fans of the series everything's still the same - Artemis still has the upper edge on the Fairies who think they have him where they want him, the characters are still fully defined and well used, never doing anything they wouldn't, and the encrypted lines at the bottom of the page are still not worth the effort decoding.

For those new to the series, they can only be recommended - in any order, but of course preferrably from the beginning onwards. Theediscerning is twenty years older than the target audience (and then some), but to him and the more expected reader, Artemis Fowl is rollocking entertainment.




This review is a slightly edited version of the original, posted by an alias of theediscerning's on the bookbag site. He still claims copyright to both versions.

Summary: The rollicking entertainment levels are attained yet again