Series Talk - The Artemis Fowl Addition

If you've been paying attention to my sidebar lists of books I'm reading and those recently finished, you know I'm working my way through the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer.

Since I began composing this post three days two and a half weeks ago, I have finished the first six books in the series. Book seven, Artemis Fowl: The Atlantis Complex, released on Tuesday, August 3. I'm #7 on the waiting list at the local library. ^_^

Yeah. It's that good.

I wasn't so sure when I started reading the first book. After all, Artemis wasn't exactly a hero back then. Criminal mastermind, yes. Hero, not so much.

Yet the series is named for him. You would expect him to be the hero of such a series. At least, I did.

And he is the hero. Eventually.

Not in the first book, and only debatedly in the second book.

The more he gets to know The People, especially Holly Short - the LEPrecon agent he kidnapped in book one - the more of a hero he becomes. As the books progress, you see less and less of the self-centered criminal mastermind he was and more of the hero he becomes.

That journey makes the entire series real for me. It doesn't happen in one book, but over the course of several. Just as in real life, people don't change quickly but gradually.