collected
Fiction · Novel · Fantasy · Science Fiction
About 8 h 45 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 18 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
Artemis Fowl gathers fairy officials on an Icelandic glacier to demonstrate an invention intended to slow global warming, but Captain Holly Short notices his obsessive rituals and growing distrust of his friends. His experiments with fairy magic have caused Atlantis Complex, a fictional illness that disrupts the intelligence his allies rely on. When a hostile spacecraft interrupts the demonstration and an enemy from Holly’s past threatens the underwater city of Atlantis, they need Artemis’s calculating mind more than ever.
The seventh adventure in this middle-grade fantasy series combines comic dialogue, elaborate technology and fairy magic. The action follows several groups, including Butler and his wrestler sister Juliet, so Artemis’s predicament is one strand of a broader adventure.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Yes, reading the earlier adventures first is advisable: this is the seventh Artemis Fowl adventure, and the threat involves an enemy from Holly’s past. Artemis’s friendships and his allies’ reliance on his intelligence are central to the predicament.
Not really, the prose is direct, witty and driven by dialogue, with a brisk pace and a linear storyline. The main complication is following several groups across multiple viewpoints, with Artemis’s predicament forming one strand of the adventure.
Artemis’s fictional illness disrupts the calculating intelligence his allies depend on, but the adventure also follows other groups, including Butler and his wrestler sister Juliet. His predicament shares space with a threat to the underwater city of Atlantis.
Strong violence is the main concern in a suspenseful adventure involving a hostile spacecraft and a threat to Atlantis. Artemis also experiences obsessive rituals and growing distrust of his friends as part of the fictional Atlantis Complex illness.
About 432 pages in the Disney-Hyperion 2019 edition. The brisk pace and dialogue-driven prose keep the adventure moving as the action shifts between groups.
Disney-Hyperion · 2019 · paperback. ISBN 9781368036948.
About 8 hours 45 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 432-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....
