collected
Fiction · Novel · Fantasy · Adventure
About 7 h 15 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 15 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
At the Fowl family estate, pixie Opal Koboi plans to wipe out humanity using the spirits of ancient fairy soldiers, who can possess nearby bodies—including animals and Artemis’s young twin brothers, Myles and Beckett. Artemis and fairy police officer Holly Short must stop her, drawing Butler and Mulch Diggums into a fight that puts both his family and the human world at risk.
The pace is fast, the schemes elaborate, and the humor runs from fairy technology to dwarf bodily functions. As the eighth and final installment in the original Artemis Fowl series, this middle-grade fantasy assumes familiarity with the earlier books.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Yes, the eighth and final installment in the original Artemis Fowl series assumes familiarity with the earlier books. Start earlier in the series before tackling Artemis and Holly’s fight against Opal Koboi.
Not really, the prose is direct, witty, and driven by dialogue, with a fast pace and a linear storyline. The elaborate schemes and shifts between several characters’ viewpoints require some attention.
Strong violence accompanies a threat to humanity, with ancient fairy soldiers able to possess animals and Artemis’s young twin brothers. The tone is dark and tense, though humor involving fairy technology and dwarf bodily functions runs alongside the danger.
The fast adventure gives space to both elaborate schemes and personal stakes: Artemis and Holly must stop Opal while his family is at risk. Family, friendship, morality, mortality, and redemption are central themes.
368 pages in the Disney Hyperion 2019 paperback edition.
Disney Hyperion · 2019 · Paperback. ISBN 9781368038836.
About 7 hours 15 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 368-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....
