sawyl | Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident (Reply)

As part of my on-going enthusiasm for YA coupled with an all too sadly necessary book write-up amnesty, here are a few very brief thoughts on Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident, the second in the series about his eponymous criminal mastermind.

Artemis Fowl has discovered that his father, lost some years before when the ship he was on was sunk by the Russian mafia, may be be alive after all. Coming up with a cunning plan that involves a combination of magic and technology, he comes up with a way to sucker Holly Short and Commander Julius Root of the LEP Recon police into helping him.

Midway through the mission to a particularly radioactive part of the arctic, things go horribly wrong in the fairy city of Haven when all sorts of clever bits of technology invented by pixie industrialist Opal Koboi suddenly stop working. Forced to put the mission to recover Artemis Senior on hold the group call on the help of criminal dwarf Mulch Diggums, who has been living it up in Los Angeles after faking his own death in the first novel, and set about infiltrating the impenetrable fortress that is Koboi Labs.

The Arctic Incident marks the first of the books were Artemis and the fairies find themselves forced to put aside their differences and work together and rather to their mutual surprise, they get on well together and turn out to have skill sets that dovetail rather nicely. The recovery of Artemis Fowl Senior plot feels a little bit of afterthought at times, but the utter barminess of Opal Koboi more than makes up for it — as does Foley's entertaining response to Opal's attempts to scapegoat him as the book's Big Bad.