collected
Fiction · Novel · Fantasy · Science Fiction
About 7 h 45 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 16 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
Thirteen-year-old Artemis Fowl plans one last criminal payoff before going straight, taking a supercomputer built from stolen fairy technology to a London meeting with American billionaire Jon Spiro. Spiro steals the machine, and Artemis's bodyguard Butler is critically wounded. Artemis turns to fairy police captain Holly Short to save his friend and recover an invention that could expose the underground fairy world.
Fast, sarcastic and full of gadgets, the middle-grade fantasy adventure follows an elaborate heist built on bluffing, technical ingenuity and uneasy cooperation. The third installment assumes familiarity with the first two books, especially Artemis's changing relationship with his former fairy enemies.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Yes, the third installment assumes familiarity with the first two adventures, especially Artemis’s changing relationship with his former fairy enemies. His uneasy cooperation with Holly Short builds on that history.
Not really, the prose is direct, witty and driven by dialogue, with a brisk pace and a linear storyline. The elaborate heist involves bluffing and technical ingenuity, while the viewpoint shifts between characters.
Fairy technology connects the fantasy adventure to a technology thriller: a stolen supercomputer could expose the underground fairy world. Recovering it involves an elaborate heist, gadgets, bluffing and uneasy cooperation.
The violence is mild, though Butler is critically wounded after Spiro steals Artemis’s supercomputer. Saving him gives the otherwise sarcastic, playful adventure a tense and emotionally serious element.
It suits a middle-grade audience looking for a fast, sarcastic fantasy adventure full of gadgets. The central heist emphasizes technical ingenuity and bluffing, alongside friendship and Artemis’s attempt to leave crime behind.
384 pages in the Disney-Hyperion 2018 paperback edition.
Disney-Hyperion · 2018 · paperback. ISBN 9781368036955.
About 7 hours 45 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 384-page Disney-Hyperion edition. Dense books can take longer.
Eoin Colfer is an Irish writer of children’s literature whose work combines brisk adventure, comic plotting, fantasy, and science fiction. A former primary school teacher, he writes in direct, dialogue-driven prose and tends to organize stories around ingenious plans, reversals, and competing systems of knowledge. The Artemis Fowl series gives this method its clearest form. Its twelve-year-old criminal prodigy treats the hidden fairy world as both a discovery and an opportunity, while technologically advanced fairies answer his schemes with elaborate countermeasures. The first novel turns a hostage crisis at Fowl Manor into a prolonged contest of calculation. The Eternity Code widens that contest through stolen fairy technology, a supercomputer, and an uneasy alliance assembled for a retrieval mission. Folklore and machinery share the same practical reality in these books, and trust is often negotiated under pressure rather than granted in advance. Colfer has also written for very young readers, collaborated on graphic novels, and extended Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide series with And Another Thing....
