Reviews

Der Atlantis-Komplex by Eoin Colfer

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carlyxdeexx's review against another edition

2.0

This one’s definitely not a fave! While the early books in the series built genuine tension and suspense, this one really doesn’t. Nothing about the characters grew or surprised me, and even though all my favorites were front and center, I found myself uninterested in them—they were at the mercy of the action around them for pretty much the entire book, and not in a way that was compelling. I particularly disliked how this book handled mental illness—Colfer’s past books did subtly imply a slight ignorance of and lack of concern for mental illness and psychotherapy and psychiatry, but the “Atlantis Complex” being the center of this book really put these things in the spotlight and made them near-unbearable. Firstly, the Atlantis Complex itself just seems so thoughtlessly smashed together! I don’t consider myself an expert, but I do think that even and perhaps especially when you’re creating a new mental illness, it needs to be believable and serious regardless of whether or not magic is involved. Artemis’s struggle seemed to be more of a joke than anything else, his Complex described as something like “OCD mixed with MPD” which completely oversimplifies both associated disorders (MPD is actually DID now I think). And I understand this is a book “for kids” and a “product of its time” (holy crap 2010 is almost a decade ago) but one of the things I always loved about this series was how smart it was and how it didn’t hold back with kids on things like Sig Sauers and retina cams and Kevlar vests and places like Murmansk and Helsinki and Taipei. It would be rewarding to see a book like this for this age group that took mental illness seriously, that managed to shed some light on how it actually feels to have OCD and DID instead of seemingly relying on cobbled-together stereotypes and lightheartedly making fun of them. Artemis coming to terms with a newfound mental illness, struggling with his ultimate realization that it has no bearing on his startling intellect, realizing the importance of his emotions and his relationships to his stability and day-to-day functioning, acknowledging that help is not only something he needs but something that is ultimately rewarding and nothing to be disparaged for, that could have been so cool to see! And maybe we would have seen that in this book if it was written now and not ~10 years ago, which is a testament to how far we’ve come. One more book to go in this series—I hope it goes back to its roots and isn’t anything like this one.