Artemis Fowl

[Sylvia Adair <adair@EXECPC.COM>]

Hi, all.  I read this yesterday, because of all the discussion, and I
have to say I was not impressed.  The title character is the "bad
guy", a 12 year old genius supervillain who turns out to have a
rudimentary conscience, but Artemis is not really the center of the
story.  The tale is littered with stereotypes, and only two female
characters out of a cast of hundreds of extras.  The high tech gadgets
are interesting (especially to a scifi fan like me) but
characterization is extremely poor.  As someone else said, this seems
to be a cross between fantasy and scifi, which I have seen done well
by some authors (Mercedes Lackey comes to mind) but not here.
However, I don't find this book objectionable, even though it is
terribly violent and obviously influenced by hours of bad t.v.  It's
not anything I'm going to recommend to kids, but having paid for it,
I'm going to put it on the shelves.  The reading level is fairly high,
fifth grade and above in my opinion.
How anybody could confuse this media-driven story with Harry Potter is
beyond me.  It is very hard to find a character to care about.
Just my opinion.
Sylvia L. Adair, K-8 Library Media Specialist
Lomira, Wisconsin
adair@execpc.com

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