So Colfer pumped some volume back into the series with The Lost Colony, but how does he keep it going? By bringing back a psychotic mastermind. This novel begins after the last novel ends (clearly) and picks up with Artemis who hasn’t aged at all, but is supposedly three years older than he was due to the final trip in time during the last novel and bringing Hydras back to the current plane of existence.
This novel centers around a series of time loops which all occur as a result of Artemis attempting to keep his parents in the dark about why he hasn’t aged during his absence and to keep the underworld hidden from them. If you think about it to long you could easily get stuck in an existential quandary of whether any of the series would have happened if he did or did not go back in time or did or did not try and cure his mother.
What better way to spice up a series than to throw in a new species and add a love interest? I can’t think of any! (This is only said with partial sarcasm and disdain.)
As readers begin the fourth book of the Artemis Fowl series we are in essence starting over again from Artemis’ perspective. After the mind wipe at the end of The Eternity Code I can imagine readers not knowing whether the series would continue. I hope that when Colfer wrote the book he actually questioned whether there would be additional adventures. As we begin this novel in the series, we wouldn’t know who would or would not appear with half the main cast receiving memory wipes and the other half forbidden to approach them.
So how should I begin this review? I’m already another book past this review (as I said in the last one) and I’ve managed to stay mostly off topic for the last reviews and I will do so again at least for the first part of this review.
I struggled to limit my non-‘review’ commentary on the last book and luckily this is a pretty long series so I get to stretch it out over quite a few books.