Artemis Fowl and The Last Guardian

Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl and The Last Guardian is a fast, funny fairy thriller for 10 year olds, and it is very much not the place to start.

What happens

It opens underground, with a hundred dead fairy warriors arranged in a spiral beneath a rune stone. They have been down there ten thousand years. Their bodies are long gone. What is left is their hatred of humans and one order they were given as the earth was shovelled over them. Remember and return.

Then we cut to a psychiatrist's office in Haven City, where Artemis is sitting through his last therapy session and being unbearable about it.

He has memorised all six hundred inkblot cards. He knows which one he is being shown by its number. He tells the doctor his theory needs a better name, then works out what is wrong with the doctor's hip from a childhood detail and hands over a design for a brace, sketched on a napkin while he was kept waiting.

That is the pleasure of these books. Artemis is the cleverest person in every room and he cannot resist letting you know. His bodyguard Butler is six and a half feet tall in a city built for three-footers and spends the whole chapter trying not to bang his head. Holly Short does the eye-rolling for all of us.

Underneath the showing off, something softer is going on. Holly has been visiting a clone of her worst enemy, a creature grown in a lab who has no name of her own and is not expected to live long. Artemis has quietly been coming with her, and has taught her to copy a rhythm tapped on the glass.

That thread is worth knowing about before you hand it over. The clone is dying and the book says so plainly, in the same calm voice it uses for everything else. If your reader is tender about that sort of thing, it may sit with them longer than the fairy gadgets do.

A word on where this one sits. The story keeps referring back to things Artemis has already done, including time travel, a mind-wiped family and an enemy who is already locked up when the book begins. Your reader will follow the action, but the weight of it lands much harder if they know these people first.

What to read next

So if this is their introduction to Artemis, go and get the first Artemis Fowl book instead. He is twelve, he has never met a fairy, and he is about to kidnap one for ransom.