One week after their eleventh birthday, the Fowl twins--scientist Myles, and Beckett, the force of nature--are left in the care of house security (NANNI) for a single night. In that time they befriend a troll who has clawed his way through the earth's crust to the surface. Unfortunately for the troll, he is being chased by a nefarious nobleman and an interrogating nun, who both need the magical creature for their own gain, as well as a fairy-in-training who has been assigned to protect him. The boys and their new troll best friend escape and go on the run. Along the way they get shot at, kidnapped, buried, arrested, threatened, killed (temporarily), and discover that the strongest bond in the world is not the one forged by covalent electrons in adjacent atoms, but the one that exists between a pair of twins.
It seems I haven't yet reviewed most of Colfer's books on here yet, despite having read (nearly all of) and loved (most of) them. Seems I'll need to rectify that someday...
Picking up a few years after our last foray with the Fowl family, the more things change the more they stay the same. The Fowls are still involved with their own hobbies, operating mostly within the law but finding it best to ask forgiveness than permission. Artemis has turned his attention to space, and is actually on his way to Mars at the moment. But Myles and Beckett are about to discover that the bedtime stories he told them weren't as fictional as they assumed.
Back in the saddle, I loved reading about the Fowls and fairies once again. Admittedly apprehensive about following the younger siblings (who were more of a nuisance in the last book), I was shortly put at ease by the camaraderie they shared and the humor they brought. Neither seemed as cynical and snarky as Artemis or Holly, but they worked off each other well and were fun to follow. Lazuli (the fairy-in-training) was likewise not as surefooted as we left off with Holly, but she was still a great character in her own right, and I enjoyed seeing her origin story, as it were.
The villains were great fun to root against. Each started out fairly standard, but as they had more time with the twins, their own eccentricities were brought out little by little until you had a Looney Tunes villain. Still, both were intelligent, even if they didn't ever quite know when they were beaten (but who wants to cede defeat to a cocky eleven-year-old?).
I found the narrator of this story not as easy to follow as the last series. Mostly it was fine around the twins, since they were nearly always talking to each other, but whenever the focus shifted to one of the villains (the nefarious nobleman) I found the poshness of the 'voice' a bit too much at times. There also seemed to be more technobabble than I remembered there being with their older brother, but that may just be my miss-remembering.
As with all previous Fowl books, the word I'd best use to describe the story is "fun". It's smart, adventurous, and has plenty of action and humor to entertain even the most stubborn young reader. The language is engaging, being simultaneously detailed but not talking down to you (though Myles always seems to sound like that), and the characters are unforgettable, even if you might not remember their full extended names... I'd highly recommend this to anyone and everyone who has a fondness for magic and wit, and I'm excited to see where the series takes us from here.
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