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.
About the book
Demons are appearing on Earth, threatening to expose the hidden fairy world, and Holly Short needs Artemis Fowl’s calculations to predict where they will arrive. In a Sicilian theater, Artemis encounters a rival: twelve-year-old genius Minerva Paradizo, who wants to capture a demon for scientific study. Behind the appearances is a failing ancient spell that holds the demons’ island outside ordinary time.
Reader notes
The fifth Artemis Fowl novel is a middle-grade fantasy adventure, brisk and sarcastically funny, combining magical technology with the complications of time travel. It builds on friendships and rivalries established in the earlier books, so reading those first helps.
How it reads
Writing style
Dialogue-driven · Direct · Witty
Tone
Hopeful · Humorous · Playful · Suspenseful
Structure
Braided
Driven by
Character · Plot · Worldbuilding
Point of view
Multiple viewpoints
Setting
Barcelona · Hybras
Reading complexity
Writing
2 / 5
Ideas
2 / 5
Structure
3 / 5
Background knowledge
2 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Writing
How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas
How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure
How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge
Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity
Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
Yes, reading the earlier books first helps. This fifth entry builds on friendships and rivalries already established in the Artemis Fowl series.
Is it hard to read?
Not really, the prose is direct, witty, and driven by dialogue. The complications come from time travel and braided storylines with multiple points of view.
What kind of adventure is it?
A brisk, sarcastically funny fantasy adventure combining magical technology with time travel. Demons appearing on Earth threaten the hidden fairy world, while Artemis encounters a rival genius who wants to capture one for scientific study.
How long is it?
About 432 pages in the Disney Hyperion 2018 edition. The pace is fast, with dialogue-driven prose and an adventure involving a failing spell and time travel.
Which edition is shown here?
Disney Hyperion · 2018 · paperback. ISBN 9781368036962.
How long does it take to read The Lost Colony?
About 8 hours 45 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 432-page Disney Hyperion edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
Eoin Colfer
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....
