I recently finished reading the newest book in the Artemis Fowl children's series, The Time Paradox. To be blunt, I pretty much hated it.I was coming here to say that I'd liked it far less than any of the previous books, but then I learned that I didn't like the last one all that much. And somehow, I'd completely forgotten that fact, which I guess shows you how little a lasting impression it made on me. Apparently, I said at the time that the last book probably marked the end of the trail for me and Artemis Fowl books.
Now you can cross out that "probably." The first two or three books of the series were fun. Briskly paced and entertaining despite being fully aimed at a young audience, there was something just escapist and innocuous about them. But now the writer has just become lazy.
The Time Paradox is basically the plot of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Artemis faces a crisis in the present, for which the only resolution is to travel to the past and recover an extinct species of animal. But at least that Star Trek movie used a lot of humor and other good elements to mute the cudgel of its message -- it entertained as it preached.
I consider myself to be at least a moderately pro-environmentalist type person, but I found myself getting annoyed with this book at times. Besides the extinction plot itself, the book frequently drops references to carbon footprints, energy conservation, and more. I'm fine with a book having a message. But if it's going to be a work of fiction, I believe the author has a duty to cloak these things in some semblance of plot or, better still, allegory. No such luck here.
Ham-fisted and manipulative, I think I'd find this book vaguely insulting even if I were of the let's-say-early-teen target age. Whatever I found to like early in the series was long gone here. This is surely a book I would never have finished, had it not been so short. It came perilously close to undermining the fact I enjoyed the early books of the series in the first place.
Don't read this.
4 comments:
You don't have a taste for books i guess!
Really? Someone posts a well thought out critique of a book with specific points that he found lacking - and your counter point is that he has no taste?
It would be just as valid for someone here to comment back to you.
To say that by your profile you have an immature scope of material. You seem singularly focused on one type of literature - making you a person that is myopic, unenlightened, and unqualified to pass any judgements on another person's critiques. Or that a comment as crass, blindly idiotic, and inflammatory as yours shows that not only did you not read the critique, but gave not a second of thought to the points which were made.
Someone could say that. But that would be rude.
And this was sarcasm.
If you don't understand that either, you can find the definition of that and the other big people words used over here by visiting http://www.dictionary.com.
/Sorry for the rant, everyone.
//God I hate stupid comment snipers.
Shansan,
On the contrary, I have quite the taste for books, as I think would be obvious from the fact that books is one of the more commonly used tags on my blog. (More that 24 or Battlestar Galactica, which probably would surprise most people who read me regularly.)
But I have a taste for GOOD books. I would have put the first two or three books in that category. (Certainly good for children's books, at the very least.) This most recent book simply isn't in the same league.
I think drheimlich loves the taste of books.
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