Artemis Fowl

Eoin Colfer

It seems inevitable in this post-Harry Potter kidlit landscape that someone would have had to come up with an anti-Harry, a creature as slimy and loathsome as that little Potter brat is good and pure. Eoin Colfer made a valiant attempt in Artemis Fowl. And while he steps in a major pothole along the way, in the general scheme of things he did a pretty good job.

Artemis Fowl is not your typical twelve-year-old. He is guarded by a mountain of a man wherever he goes (think Professor Toru Tanaka in a dark suit and shades), his father is missing and presumed dead, his mother is off her gourd, and—oh, yes—he's a brilliant criminal mastermind who aims to restore the wealth his family lost on the same trip where his father went missing. How does he aim to do this? By stealing fairies' gold. No, I kid you not. Fairies are real, and Fowl wants what they've got.

It's a great setup, and it's carried off relatively well. There are a few places where the pace bogs down, but for the most part it rolls along smoothly as Artemis gathers his information, goes about kidnapping a fairy, and hatches a plan within a plan within a plan that keeps her rescuers (and the readers) on their toes wondering what all he's on about. This is certainly readable enough, though there are points one gets to where putting the book down and going off to do things like eat or sleep seems manageable. (Compare to, say, Kathe Koja's kidlit, which will plague your dreams if you try to sleep before you finish the book.)

Where Colfer goes painfully wrong, as where most authors go painfully wrong when writing kidlit, is to break the first rule taught in every book ever written on kidlit and every course ever taught on kidlit. The rule goes, with some variations, “don't talk down to your audience.” The problem doesn't exist just in kidlit, of course, and hundreds of thousands of useless books, both fiction and nonfiction, are published every year that assume the public is made up of blithering idiots. As true as this may be, it's also still true that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar. If you're putting an environmentally conscious subtext in your book, showing an image of diseased dolphins is more than enough (and, in fact, the very brief description given is quite stomach-turning on its own, and would have been greatly effective had he ended the sermon there); when you've stated your case in images, there's no need to then go off on a mini-tangent that amounts to “if I leave it like that, you won't get it, so I'm going to explain that last bit for you to make sure you understand what I'm on about.” It's insulting to the reader's intelligence, it distracts from the value of the book, and it destroys the pace, even if it's only one sentence of explanation. It's redundant. Colfer doesn't just wade in this muck pit once (which might have been forgivable), but he does it at various times throughout the novel. One gets the feeling at times this is what an adventure novel would sound like had it been written by Amiri Baraka or Joan Baez.

If you can stomach being preached to in the middle of an adventure novel, by all means, pick it up. If you bristle every time an author pauses to explain something to you, you're probably better off avoiding it.