Artemis Fowl and The Time Paradox

Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl and The Time Paradox is a fairy-tech thriller for 10 year olds that opens with the one problem Artemis cannot think his way out of.

What happens

We meet him teaching French restaurant vocabulary to his two year old twin brothers. It is going badly. Beckett would rather talk about worms. Myles whispers that Artemis is a simple-toon.

Then their father walks in, and he has been crying.

Angeline Fowl went to bed with what everyone took for flu. A day later she is unrecognisable. The specialist brought in from Trinity College says her organs are all failing and she has days.

Artemis is not frightened for long, because he thinks he has this. He came home from Limbo with fairy magic running through him, the only human alive who has any. He takes his mother's hand and pushes it into her.

It does not take. Something in her shoves it straight back out.

That is the setup, and the way out of it is the one the title promises. The cure is an animal that no longer exists. The reason it no longer exists is Artemis himself, years ago, before he had anyone he loved enough to save.

One thing to flag before you hand this over. Angeline's illness is on the page in close detail and it is grim. Her hand is a parcel of bones. Her eyes have sunk into dark sockets. She wakes up clawing at the air and asking her son whether she is dreaming. Her husband cries in front of him. If you've got a reader with a poorly parent or grandparent right now, this could land very hard. If they can take it, that fear is the engine of the whole book, and it makes Artemis far more interesting than any heist ever did.

The pleasure of reading him is watching a boy who is right about absolutely everything run into something that will not be reasoned with. He notices which college the doctor trained at. He cannot make his brother stop saying simple-toon.

This one sits well into the series, and the book does not pretend otherwise. The first few pages walk you past the troll that wrecked the hall, the three years his parents believed him dead and the friendships he has since made underground. Your reader can absolutely start here. They will just be meeting someone who has already done a lot of changing.

What to read next

If they would rather meet him before any of that, the very first Artemis Fowl book has him at twelve, sweating in a Vietnamese cafe, calmly informing the man pouring his tea that he is not a waiter at all.