Artemis Fowl and The Opal Deception has a lovely problem at its centre. The hero cannot remember that the villain exists.<\/p>\n
Artemis has been mind-wiped by the fairy police. Everything he knew about the underground city, the centaur who built its technology and the elf captain he nearly became friends with has been lifted out of his head. As far as he is concerned, fairies are nonsense. He is in Munich, hunting a painting.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile Opal Koboi is waking up.<\/p>\n
Opal is a pixie billionaire who once bankrolled an armed uprising against her own people. She has spent almost a year in a private clinic in a coma, drooling, DNA swabbed four times a day, with a tracker under the skin of her arm and cameras on her around the clock.<\/p>\n
She has also been faking every minute of it.<\/p>\n
The break-out is the best thing in the opening. Two pixie brothers wheel her out under the false bottom of a cleaning trolley and leave a cloned copy strapped in her place, identical down to the last follicle, with the tracker cut out of her arm and sewn into its own. The doctor comes sprinting in, swabs the clone’s mouth, reads the name on his screen and sighs with relief.<\/p>\n
Colfer tells it all as an article posted on the fairy internet by an anonymous writer who is very obviously Foaly the centaur and is deeply annoyed about being overlooked. It is funny, and it quietly catches a reader up at the same time.<\/p>\n
Only quietly, though. This comes a long way into the books, and the plot leans on things that happened earlier. The mind-wipe. The goblin uprising. Who Holly Short is, and why it matters that somebody is planning to wreck her career. Your reader will follow it, but they will be working.<\/p>\n
Worth knowing about the tone here. Opal is chilling rather than silly. She tells her staff they live only as long as they serve. She wants her cleverest enemy beaten, humiliated and alone before she kills him, and she says so while stretching out on the sofa like a cat in the sun. It is delivered lightly, which is precisely what makes it land, and a reader who found the earlier books mostly comic will notice the change.<\/p>\n
There is also a dwarf whose chief talent is flatulence, so the balance is maintained.<\/p>\n
If the mind-wipe is the bit your reader keeps asking about, the very first Artemis Fowl book is in the library. A twelve year old with a bodyguard, a plan and no scruples whatsoever sets out to kidnap a fairy and hold her to ransom, having entirely underestimated what fairies can do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Artemis Fowl and The Opal Deception has a lovely problem at its centre. The hero cannot remember that the villain exists. Artemis has been mind-wiped by the fairy police. Everything he knew about the underground city, the centaur who built its technology and the elf captain he nearly became friends with has been lifted out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10686,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":6832,"lr_next_read_anchor":"the very first Artemis Fowl book","lr_seo_hook":"The villain is back and the hero has forgotten she ever existed."},"book_tag":[27],"age_group":[29],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[310],"class_list":["post-6837","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-fantasy-books","age_group-books-for-10-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-eoin-colfer"],"yoast_title":"Artemis Fowl and The Opal Deception by Eoin Colfer | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"The villain is back and the hero has forgotten she ever existed. For ages 10+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n