Barbara Ludman
Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer (Viking)
Any book that will keep children reading after they’ve devoured all four Harry Potter books is worth a try, but the hero of this one is perhaps not the kind of fellow you want as a role model for your children. Artemis Fowl, the scion of a long line of Irish gangsters, is a 12-year-old kidnapper, extortionist and bully with a single redeeming quality: he loves his mother. Oh yes, and he rather likes whales, we discover when he blows up a whaler.
Artemis will do anything to revive the family fortunes after his father is lost at sea and his mother retires into a pre-widowhood fantasy world. He’s a genius and a computer whizz, and when he forces an alcoholic fairy the real kind, with wings and all to hand over the species’s rulebook, it takes him only hours to break the code which, incidentally, runs along the bottom of every page of the book.
His intention is to get his hands on some fairy gold, and he kidnaps a leprechaun actually an officer in the LEPrecon fairy police and holds her for ransom
There are some funny bits: the cast includes a paranoid centaur, the odd troll and goblin and a dirt-eating dwarf, the best character in the book. Holly Short, the kidnapped LEPrecon, has a nice line in trickery.
But Harry Potter it’s not, not by a long shot although, as with the Potter books, a film is on its way. Maybe the film will explain why he’s named after a Greek goddess, but I wouldn’t count on it.
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