Boy, Was I Disappointed

I finished The Opal Deception by Eoin Colfer and thought it was a disappointing entry to the series.

In my humble opinion (and if the reviews at Amazon are any indication, it is only my humble opinion), Colfer goes wrong in a couple of the same ways that Rowling goes wrong. First, he confuses "series" with "serial." The Opal Deception is something of a continuation of The Eternity Code just as The Half Blood Prince is a continuation of whatever the heck Rowling's fifth book was called. Rowling just assumes everyone has memorized every detail in her books. Colfer, on the other hand, spends a lot of time awkwardly bringing readers up to speed. Second, Colfer feels compelled to kill someone off. The Artemis Fowl books are clever, witty, thrillers. They aren't deep, they aren't going to explain the meaning of life to anyone. The death wasn't necessary, and the grieving was out of place in a book that relies heavily on fart jokes. Oh? You say that in a series with so much mayhem it's unrealistic that no one dies? Need I remind you that these are books about fairies, pixies, trolls, and gnomes? We gave up on reality a few years back. What's more, the dead character was replaced with another almost like the one who bought the farm.

The plot is very choppy, too, with all kinds of jumps from character to character and place to place. This was true of one of the earlier books, but it wasn't nearly as grating as it was this time.

What a bummer.

More on the Goose Girl

I read the Grimm version of The Goose Girl. I'm very impressed that Shannon Hale found the original tale inspiring enough to come up with her The Goose Girl.