Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

 Artemis is a 12-year-old genious and heir one of the richest crime families in the world.  He is also mourning the loss of his father, who has disappeared, and his mother, who has lost her senses in grief.  To distract himself, Artemis spends all his time reserching fairy lore and discovers that leprecauns are real.  He decides that he will try to catch one and hold it for ransome.  When he does, he discovers that the fairy folk are much more than he bargained for.  

I was surprised to find that I don't have a blog post for this one.  We read this whole series to our kids when they were growing up.  It is full of wit, action, an fun. I am reading it again because it is our Parent/Child book club title for September.  My kids loved Artemis Fowl, I think, because they were also super smart, and they enjoyed the fact that Artemis stayed one step ahead of his opponents. Now that I have to present it to my parent/child book club, I realize it is not super full of deep meaning.  Mr Colfer does a good job of making all of the characters dimensional. You can kind of see, in this first book, that Artemis is really just a little boy who is hurting, but he isn't super moral yet. During the rest of the series, and because of his interactions with the fairies, particularly Holly,  Artemis learns to be a good guy instead of a super villain.  But I can see why some of my friends were not as thrilled with this series as I was when I first read it.  It will be interesting to see what my parent/child book club families think. (2001, 304 p)

PS: The reason I chose this book is because Disney did a series based on it in 2020.  However, I was just reading the reviews, and they weren't very good.