>>102725719>Colfer kept on pulling random super geniuses out of his ass to match wits with Artemis, and the introduction of some super-genius girl in book 5 finally went a step too far for me.Honestly, it's a children's book series. Having another super child genius isn't too farfetched. Narratively book 5 has the best bookending of the series, in my opinion. Artemis has come full circle and acknowledged that, shit, he's growing up, and he also needs to be challenged and wants to put his new morality to something useful. We see Artemis faced with, essentially, himself, but without the criminal background nor the strict goal (rescue my dad), so it was a bad combination of naivete and an abstract goal. The fairy-mad guy I thought was a genuinely nice twist for an antagonist, where the typical hero actions only work to confirm a poor guy's twisted childhood trauma. And Abbot was genuinely fun. He didn't have grand machinations, he just wanted to coast on stolen magic and be in charge somewhere that he was the legendary hero. The time-skipping at the end was pretty great for a climactic moment, and at the end rather than the Fowl family being shattered by the father's disappearance, we get Artemis returning to a family larger than the one he left, giving him much to catch up on. If it ended at 5 I'd have called it a satisfying series.
