569 reviews for:

The Opal Deception

Eoin Colfer

3.94 AVERAGE

adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
adventurous slow-paced
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: No

Nothing... happened in this book... One of the major faults I find in this series (aside from it being written as if it were smarter than it is) is that the books are like 90% explaining how things work bc the world building is so flimsy.

Also, I love when fantasy writers are like "you know what this brand new untouched fantasy world of mine needs? sexism" and it's not even spicy new sexism like "women are forbidden from using magic" but it's just garden variety sexism like "women don't have important jobs" or "women aren't trusted with responsibility."

Still love this series.
adventurous fast-paced

In my opinion this was where the series peaked and I could have done without the following sequels. I remember laughing a lot because Artemis had grown so much from the first book. There was a lot of enjoyment in seeing the changes.
I especially laughed when he said he felt like a walking advertisement when we he was dressed as a "normal" teen.

I don't remember when I've finished re-reading this one... But it as lovely and interesting as it was when I was a kid reading AF series. Love to watch the characters and their relationships grow and evolve, and damn, my own view of them has changed, thanks to near a decade since I first read AF.

The characters have grown so much since the first book. I really liked watching how Artemis dealt with his memories and the triggers for both himself and Butler.

I still love this book.

When I read the Artemis Fowl series as a kid, The Opal Deception stood out as my favorite. I just LOVE Opal as a villain. She’s cheesy and incompetent and overstuffed and I love it. In many ways, she reminds me of Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove – filled with evil plots and intentions, but surrounded by unhelpful minions and plans that exceed her abilities. Basically, someone who is too smart for her own good and makes a mess of things.

The Opal Deception excels in other ways for me – for one, we get a partnership between Butler and Mulch, which just seems so unlikely and hilarious to me. These two characters could not be more different. This is something Eoin Colfer really excels at – his characters will usually split into teams, and they are always entertaining.

The other pairing, of course, is Artemis and Holly. Colfer manages to keep these two fresh by inserting outside elements in each book that affect their relationship. In The Eternity Code, Artemis and Holly were a well-polished team, but through most of The Opal Deception, Artemis is struggling to recover his memories of the faeries. We have two parallel plots here – Artemis’s struggle to realign himself and decide what path he is going to follow, and of course the whole stopping the villain thing. I like them both, and I think they go hand-in-hand very well, with Opal serving as a mirror to what Artemis may become.

It is also in The Opal Deception that we start to see the story growing up a little. The first three novels in this serious are middle grade, but here, we begin the slow descent into YA. The series takes the reader into Artemis’s late teens, and choices he makes in The Opal Deception and its following The Lost Colony shape the rest of the series.

Personally, I still really liked this one, but I can see why others may remain generally unimpressed. Taking a middle grade series into the YA world isn’t easy, and the transformative years can be particularly difficult to maintain. I appreciate the way Colfer took the plot a step up for this novel, and all the possibility implied to come at the ending.

This book kept you on the edge of your seat, anticipating, wondering, curious to see what would come next. Each scene felt important. These books really are just getting better and better.