Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception product reviews

If you like magic and secret agents then this is the perfect book for you. I started reading this series when it first came out, and I still get excited when I see a new one on the shelf.

You have your badass Holly Short, and your very smart, criminal mastermind Artemis, who have to work together to save the world as we know it. You can read this on it's own, but you may find that you get confused, as the characters already have so much depth behind them from the previous books in the series.

I feel that this is one book that would be fantastic on the big screen, but it seems to have been forgotten along the way as other, more popular, books have come out of the woodwork. Should this ever been turned into a film it will be top of my list.

Eoin Colfer (How do you pronounce Eoin?) has created a truly remarkable character in Artemis Fowl. The book tears along at almost a frantic pace carrying the reader willingly (and sometimes compulsively) from page to page, making the book damn near impossible to put down until read from cover-to-cover. Colfer has created additional reading at the bottom of each pages in a Gnomish language, which is left for the reader to crack, unless one is too lazy to crack it and researched the cryptograms on the net.
Colfer has a wonderful sense of humour and comic timing, sometimes using subtle humour, sometimes using bodily functions to amuse the reader, either way, it is all used to maximum effect; and though his books are aimed at the young adult category, there is enough humour to appeal to the adult reader.
The story centres on Artemis Fowl a 14 year-old criminal genius and his ever-present sidekick, Butler, and the fairy world. These are not fairies as we know them, these are the James Bond of the fairy world with technologically advanced centaurs more or less running the show.
Colfer is every bit as good as his contemporary writer J. K. Rowling, but in my opinion he seems to be relegated to the sidelines by the attention Harry Potter series receives. I hope with time, Colfer gets a bigger part of the limelight. He is to be watched for, and read with enthusiasm.