THE SOLARIUM

Ten words: Yikes! LEP? More like “Holly Short should LE-BE in jail!”

Or more: We all know what I’m talking about, right?

Artemis having a crush on Holly is one thing. In fact, I would argue that having a crush on Holly is the only logical response to coming in contact with a feisty elf lady who can and will kill you if necessary. But age-reversed Holly having a crush on Artemis?

My sister: The implication that the only thing keeping Holly from having a crush on Artemis is the AGE DIFFERENCE is wild.

Me: I mean, Butler is right there.

My sister: Mulch is right there!

A conversation between me and my sister when we both reread the series last year

Whether or not you think Holly and Artemis’s kiss in this book is ProblematicTM, it’s undeniably an odd choice.

Holly appears physically younger after traveling through the time stream and has less control of her emotions.The age-bending antics don’t seem to affect Artemis’s mental state as much.

A side-effect of genius? Maybe, or it could be the fact that Artemis already acts like a strange little adult, so there’s no real way to show a difference in maturity aside from potentially increasing his emotional maturity.

Emotional maturity? In my Artemis Fowl? It’s just as unlikely as you think.

So, we have a slightly physically aged Artemis and a significantly de-aged, emotionally unstable Holly Short, and they kiss. Ostensibly the only reason they don’t keep kissing is because Holly finds out that Artemis “the ends justify the means” Fowl lied to her.

Not because Holly realized she acted impulsively and made a mistake.

Not because Artemis realizes that pursuing a romance with Holly while she’s in this emotionally compromised condition would be taking advantage of her.

Not even because Artemis probably had stinky caviar breath and cold, dead fish lips anyway, and you’d think that alone would snap Holly out of it.

Yes, Holly is clearly not herself in this scenario. However, it’s not as if she has zero control. There are multiple times in the book that she addresses herself sternly, reminding herself of her actual age, experience, and capabilities.

If she can remind herself that she’s an LEP officer with decades of experience to ward off her instinctive newbie jitters, she should also be able to recognize that kissing a fifteen-year-old who just so happens to look mature for his age is, at the very least, a bad idea.

It’s just uncomfortable all around, and I’m glad that Holly’s feelings toward Artemis are strictly platonic once time travel is out of the equation.

I wonder if Orion’s Holly obsession in the next book is made to poke fun at the more overt romance of this one. Well, one book at a time.

As for this one, The Time Paradox is far from the strongest in the series. There’s nothing done here that isn’t done better in other Artemis Fowl books. Really, all that sets it apart is the time travel element and . . . you know.

It’s an even-numbered entry in the series, though, which means Opal is back! She’s as funny as ever, and as a short, self-obsessed freak with an absurdly impractical number of high-heeled boots in their closet, I have to admire her commitment to fashion.

(Don’t worry, I promise no snakes were harmed in the making of those boots I’m wearing in the Cait Corrain video.)

The book’s secondary antagonist, koala hater supreme and theater-kid-gone-wrong Damon Kronski, never for a moment feels like a genuine threat, but seeing as he’s basically Opal’s warm-up act, that’s forgivable.

He’s entertaining, at least, and his fellow Extinctionists are so cartoonishly evil that their antics are impossible not to get a kick out of.

Oh! And this is the book that introduces Myles and Beckett! I honestly forgot they existed until this very second writing the review. I like them, though. However, one thing that’s always struck me as odd is how similar Myles is to Artemis.

Obviously, they’re brothers, and they’re both geniuses, but from the first book, it’s clear that a lot of who Artemis is–or, at least, who Artemis presents himself as–stems from trauma.

He’s a boy who had to grow up too fast due to his father’s disappearance and mother’s descent into madness. He retreated behind a facade of cruel adult indifference to protect himself. He became an evil genius out of perceived necessity.

As we can see from young Artemis’s treatment of the lemur, he became convinced that morality was a luxury he could no longer afford.

Myles never had to deal with any of that.

I guess we could interpret Myles’s Artemis-isms (wearing a suit at all times, eschewing all things childish, etc) as a little kid copying his older brother, which is understandable enough. Still, it prevents Myles from truly shining as his own character.

Good thing he’s not the main character of the series, then, right?

. . . Right?

I guess now is as good a time as any to say that I couldn’t get more than a 100 pages into the first Fowl Twins book. I wanted to like it, but the adventures of Artemis III and his goofy sidekick just couldn’t pull me in.

Myles and Beckett were not necessary additions to the cast by any stretch of the imagination, but they’re fun in small doses. Besides, without them, we would never know what Artemis considers informal attire for entertaining toddlers, or that, when left alone with two small children, his first impulse is to teach them conversational French.

Also, we already have a mini-Artemis in this book in the form of Artemis himself.

I like how young Artemis’s perspective gives us more insight into the challenges he was facing going into the first book. That pressure is evident in the first book, but by then, he’s already honed his persona and is firmly in character at all times¹.

Here, you can tell that Artemis taking the first steps down a long, dark path. You know that he’ll find his way eventually, but you can’t help but feel bad for him nonetheless.

The contrast between young Artemis and current-day Artemis also highlights how much the character has grown over the course of the series. Does that make up for the fact that Artemis doesn’t seem to experience any meaningful growth in this book specifically? Maybe not, but it was still nice to see.

Fun as this book was, it might be one of the worst in the series. Its existence arguably the best argument I could give for ending the series with The Lost Colony.

I personally enjoy this one a little more than The Arctic Incident, but in terms of story and character development, I wouldn’t say it’s as well constructed.

Speaking of Artemis Fowl books that I personally enjoy but wouldn’t exactly call well constructed . . . come back next week for my review of The Atlantis Complex!

1. Well, except for maybe the lollipop moment. ↩︎