After the events of the previous four novels, it was getting to the point where something new was going to have to happen in order to prevent the books from all feeling the same. As such, we get yet another child prodigy (a 12 year old French girl by the name of Minerva) and another class of Fairy that we’ve never heard of before: Demons.

The Demons are actually fairly interesting. Rather than move underground with the rest of the People, they instead decided to take their entire island out of the normal stream of time. Unfortunately, the spell they used is wearing out, threatening yet again to expose the Fairy world to humankind. Also, for some reason, most of their culture has been based around a terrible (intentionally) in world romance novel. It’s kind of hilarious to picture a giant horned Demon named Leon Abbot.

I really do love the main Demon (Imp really, or Warlock) character of N⁰1. He’s hilarious both when contrasted against the other Demons and in his naivety of the real world.

Minerva… feels basically like a younger Artemis Fowl. She’s not quite as criminally inclined and doesn’t have near the knowledge of the fairy world to fall back on, so she’s behind from the get go. I’m curious to see what will happen with her in future books. Especially now that Artemis skipped over a few years so that they're the same age .

One unfortunate point: the dramatic shift of Holly quitting the LEP is somewhat undone when she almost immediately gets recruited by what’s essentially the Shadow Government form of the LEP: Section 8. They even hired Foaly to work for them, so what’s really changed? A bit less red tape? That was honestly one of the more interesting parts of Holly’s character, watching her chafe against the restrictions placed upon her and succeed despite (or by ignoring) them.

Overall, another solid read. The introduction of the Demon world seems forced (no one in four books has even hinted at their existence), but it mostly works. We shall see where it goes from here.