For those of you who aren't familiar with the books, Eoin Colfer is the author to blame for unleashing the rather unfortunately named Artemis Fowl character into the literary world. "A mere 12/13 boy" (depending on which book you read), Artemis is a criminal mastermind plotting to save his mother (mad), recover his father (kidnapped), and beg/borrow/steal as much money as he can (infinite.) Similar to the Potter universe, Artemis encounters fairies, pixies, dwarves, centaurs, goblins, and all sorts of other Lower Elements creatures along the way, and often (okay, always) ends up tangled with the LEPrecon force - Lower Element Police reconnaissance force (geddit, geddit? I can almost hear the author screaming with glee over this.)
 
The stories go down easily, though the characters are a little too one-dimensional for my taste. Once a blustering commander, always a blustering commander. It gets tired after a while, but I suspect I have less of a tolerance for these things than the average (teenage) reader. To make matters worse, there are slight shades of an almost Wildean sort of humour within the writing, which always irritates the hell out of me. I've read Wilde, and oh my, did his writing make my blood boil, and wish he were in front of me so that I could smack the living daylights out of him. Wildean humour irritates me like no other.

Anyway, back to Colfer - his plots and storylines are interesting, but unfortunately they are just two steps short of being intriguing. There are great things about the series, but I doubt its fan base will ever reach the epic proportions of the Potter crowd. Colfer universe just cannot hold a candle up to Rowling's Hogwarts - just like how Rowling cannot be compared with Tolkien, period. Still, it's worth taking out for a read, if you feel like you want something to read, but nothing too heavy. It's good fun.