Tuesday, 14 February 2017

I should read the Artemis Fowl books again


The Chinese cover art has been doing the rounds on tumblr recently and just looking at them makes me remember how much I loved that series (and realise how bad the covers were in this country)...
I mean, its a YA series where the young protagonist is a criminal mastermind. Okay, one who tends towards the heroic in the end but he is still a criminal. A criminal who starts the series trying to extort money out of the faeries. I am perfectly serious: he finds out that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is, in fact, the fey folk's hostage fund.

I like Artemis because, at the end of the day, his redemption arc doesn't stop him from being a criminal. Even when he's firmly on the side of the angels (well, of the faeries, centaurs, gnomes and dwarfs, at least) he is still, at his heart, a criminal. He steals things, he comes up with elaborate schemes, he's arrogant and in spite of that he's still on a journey to becoming a better person.

Just about the only complaint I have about the series is that Juliet Butler disappears for whole books at a time when I would have loved to see more of her and Holly Short interacting. They had a great little caper plot in... The Opal Deception, I think?

Huh, all the more reason to reread the series, then.

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