Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Artemis Fowl Series Book #8: The Last Guardian by Eoin Colfer


A lot of people weren’t happy with the way that JK Rowling ended her Harry Potter series. In some ways, I was one of them. I don’t like endings to epic series, they don’t always live up to my expectations. The same could be said for the last book of the Artemis Fowl series. Everything in this book wrapped up loose ends, except for a few, but there were just some things that drove me absolutely crazy…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. In the last book, Artemis went into treatment for his Atlantis Complex. When this book starts, Artemis is dealing with his last therapy session when all hell breaks loose, again. This time around, Opal is at it again, or so it seems. Two masked dwarfs take Opal from the past – the one who came through in book 6 – hostage and threaten to kill her if the LEP don’t release the current Opal from Atlantis. The only problem is that there isn’t enough time to get Opal out, and do you really want Opal on the loose? No. No you don’t.

But if the Opal they have is shot there are a lot of repercussions. Basically, the time line will split and everything that Opal has had a hand in will go BOOM. Supposedly. But the LEP doesn’t want to take any chances and begin a citywide evacuation and place Opal into an underground tube just in case she goes BOOM too.

Ah, Opal is a cunning little pixie though. She planned all of this, and with her younger self’s death, she becomes…well, I’m not even sure what she becomes. Let’s just say she becomes really powerful with dark magic, and she has a plan to unlock these ancient warriors called Berserkers to help her unlock a switch that would basically wipe out all of humanity.

So, like I said there were some things with this book that drove me absolutely crazy. For one thing, Opal. Yeah, I know, I really liked her in book 4 but when she gets dragged into half of the books in this series, you have a repetitive villain. You might as well just rename the series Artemis Fowl and Opal Koboi Take on the World. Second, the ending was just ridiculous. Artemis Fowl finally dies because of his actions – huzzah. But Butler and Holly can’t live with it and figure out a way to bring him back to life. The chrysalis that Opal used to make her clone gets brought into play to make an Artemis ‘clone.’ That’s great. Not. Why can’t you just have Artemis stay dead? And I thought everything that Opal was involved with blew up? So how was it that this chrysalis didn’t explode too? The final thing that I didn’t like about this book was that while loose ends were tied up, there was one I was disappointed that didn’t get tied up. Whatever happened to the girl genius criminal mastermind from book 5? She just sort of disappears.

Final Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. The ending wasn’t completely horrible, but there were some things that should have been done differently.

Bookshelf worthy? Support your local library!

No comments:

Post a Comment