Read for: Orbis Terrarum Challenge – Ireland
Artemis Fowl Series by Eoin Colfer, read by Nathaniel Parker.
The first five books of this series were read by Nathaniel Parker and I really enjoyed them. Parker did an excellent job reading these books. He did all different voice and accents for each character (even minor characters got their own accents). I don’t know how he kept all the accents straight but he did, consistently, through all five books. I loved listening to these books.
Artemis Fowl begins the series as an extremely intelligent 12 (?) year old boy whose father has gone missing. The family fortunes are in ruins so Artemis cooks up a scheme to make some serious cash so the family can go one living in the manner to which they are accustomed. Artemis has discovered the existence of a complete society of magical being, just below the surface of the earth. He’s also discovered a way to extort money from this society. He kidnaps a fairy named Holly Short, a captain in the LEP, the underground police organization. As the story continues, we are introduced to all kinds of magical creatures, Foaly, Commander Root and Mulch Diggums. Each of these characters and many more return for the following five books.
These books were fun and entertaining and full of suspense. I also really liked the characters. Sometimes a book can be interesting but the characters aren’t well developed or all that likable (even the ones that are supposed to be) but that is not the case in these books. Even the villians were fun to read about!
I got the sixth audiobook out of the library and started to listen to it, but there had been a change in the reader. I’m not sure why this happened, but I didn’t like the new guy. He tried to do accents too but he got them all mixed up (in relation to the accents Parker had used for each character) and it was confusing for me. I only listened to a short part of it before giving up on the audiobook. The book happened to be at the library the last time I was there so I picked it up. I have to say that I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as listening to the books. I found that the cheesiness of the previous books, that I’d been able to overlook was not as easy to ignore. These books were definitely made for a younger reading audience than me, but when I was listening to the books, I was able to forget that. I still enjoyed the book though, it was full of the same adventure and suspense as the first five and once I got over the disappointment of not being able to listen to it, I really enjoyed it, almost as much as the previous books.
