So… time travel.
After the events of The Lost Colony, it’s not entirely surprising that we’d get one where they’d outright go back and try to change the past. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t worried about it though.
So… time travel.
After the events of The Lost Colony, it’s not entirely surprising that we’d get one where they’d outright go back and try to change the past. That doesn’t mean that I wasn’t worried about it though.
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.
After I finished Graceling, I really wanted to know more about Leks. In Fire, he showed up, even if it felt really weird and not really core to the story. Here… we actually start to get just how twisted he really was.
Bitterblue takes place roughly a decade after Graceling (and around 50 years after Fire), following the story of now ~20 year old Queen Bitterblue as she tries to untangle the absolute mess her father had made of the kingdom. Add into that a bit of a princess exploring her kingdom as a commoner trope, a bit of a romance subplot, and a sprinkling of
Opal Koboi is out of her coma and back for revenge–and no one even realizes it yet. She manages to frame Holly for murder, sending her to the only person left she knows she can trust: Artemis Fowl.
The only problem? After the memory wipe of the previous book, he cannot remember her.
All of that growth that Artemis went through in the Arctic Incident? His father and mother both back and home, each with a fairy-magic-inspired positive outlook on life? Doesn’t mean that he’s above trying to exploit fairy technology for a bit more gold…
Basically, he took the helmets and other gear he stole back in the first book and turned them into a computer. On top of that, he apparently encrypted it with something called an ‘Eternity Code.’ If I understand correctly, that basically means that Artemis wrote it in a completely differently language, which makes it impossible to crack. Except that only works well if it’s completely unrelated to any known language, which runs counter to the first book. So it goes.
Two intermixed plotlines this time around.
In one, Artemis gets news that his father might just be alive and being held by the Russian mafia (for the past two years?).
Lords and Ladies continues more or less directly the events of Witches Abroad. It follows the trials and tribulations of the witches Weatherwax, Ogg, and Garlick.
This time around, a decent chunk of the book is dedicated to the Discworld idea of the Fae–which are just about as terrifying as they should be.
It’s been a while since I first read the Artemis Fowl series and I figure it’s about time to do a reread. I loved the books each previous time I read them. We’ll see how it goes this time around…
Short version? They’re still great.
This time around Alvin is on trial. Not even kidding. Most of the book is taken up by Alvin going back to stand trial for ‘stealing’ the golden plow from Makepeace. It’s actually a surprisingly decently plot and we get a lot more worldbuilding, including two different viewpoints in Europe. In one, we have a lawyer with a knack of his own who wants to learn from Alvin and looks to be a new main character. In the other, Alvin’s brother Calvin’s adventures in France, meeting Napoleon.
Unfortunately, it seems like we’ve spent yet another book just spinning in place. Alvin continues to plan on building his Crystal City and training new Makers… but he’s not getting to either any time soon. At the very end, he does manage to marry Peggy and meet up with the Prophet again, but it feels only to set up the next sequel.
Fire is something of a bizarre ‘sequel’. It’s actually set chronologically before Graceling. For the most part, it’s set in a different part of the world, separated from the previously known seven kingdoms by an (almost) impassible mountain range. And with one exception–that honestly doesn’t make that much sense–there are no characters shared between the two books. Honestly, this joins the list of books that would have been much better had they not been marketed as a sequel or even being explicitly in the same world.
There are some odd choices in the book that I don’t really understand.