I remember loving this series as a kid, but when I think about it, it's mostly because I started reading it when Harry Potter was still going, and was at exactly the right age and in the right mindset to love it. It has magic, and it's about a preteen boy; those are more or less where the similarities end, but they're enough to catch a kid's attention. The things that will keep one interested are the description, the dialogue, and the world; the first of these actually made me lose interest in the book at first, given that it starts In Media Res and I wasn't used to that, but the dialogue is genuinely funny and the world no less than fascinating.
The plot of the first book starts as "young boy swindles fairies out of gold," and manages to thicken, develop, and progress without becoming a drag or taking great mental effort to keep up with, aided by unexpected but logical twists that will neither be seen coming nor confuse the reader enough to make them call BS.
The characters in the first book are all well-distinguished and interact with each other nicely and convincingly, and this mostly holds true for the second as well, but even in the second, the problems start piling up, slowly but surely, and they just do not stop. Past the first book, Artemis is almost never a thief anymore, which was most of the reason he was so interesting in the first place; love interests for the poor kid come and go like the ball in a shell game with no warning, and often with no explanation; speaking of which, his relationship with Holly visibly confounds and confuses the author to no end; the books gradually become more and more blatant about environmentalism; by the third book, the principal characters can barely be distinguished from each other in dialogue; and, perhaps most damningly, the villains get more and more transparent, with the same one even being recycled and used in three different books.
The books up to the third are at least decent, but speaking as someone whose username for everything used to be Artemis92, they serve best as good examples of what not to do in a book series. (Really, why couldn't he have just stuck with Minerva? He and Minerva were actually halfway believable. ...And both named after Greco-Roman goddesses, which somehow took me until now to realize.)
The First Book Stands on its Own
I remember loving this series as a kid, but when I think about it, it's mostly because I started reading it when Harry Potter was still going, and was at exactly the right age and in the right mindset to love it. It has magic, and it's about a preteen boy; those are more or less where the similarities end, but they're enough to catch a kid's attention.
The things that will keep one interested are the description, the dialogue, and the world; the first of these actually made me lose interest in the book at first, given that it starts In Media Res and I wasn't used to that, but the dialogue is genuinely funny and the world no less than fascinating.
The plot of the first book starts as "young boy swindles fairies out of gold," and manages to thicken, develop, and progress without becoming a drag or taking great mental effort to keep up with, aided by unexpected but logical twists that will neither be seen coming nor confuse the reader enough to make them call BS.
The characters in the first book are all well-distinguished and interact with each other nicely and convincingly, and this mostly holds true for the second as well, but even in the second, the problems start piling up, slowly but surely, and they just do not stop.
Past the first book, Artemis is almost never a thief anymore, which was most of the reason he was so interesting in the first place; love interests for the poor kid come and go like the ball in a shell game with no warning, and often with no explanation; speaking of which, his relationship with Holly visibly confounds and confuses the author to no end; the books gradually become more and more blatant about environmentalism; by the third book, the principal characters can barely be distinguished from each other in dialogue; and, perhaps most damningly, the villains get more and more transparent, with the same one even being recycled and used in three different books.
The books up to the third are at least decent, but speaking as someone whose username for everything used to be Artemis92, they serve best as good examples of what not to do in a book series.
(Really, why couldn't he have just stuck with Minerva? He and Minerva were actually halfway believable. ...And both named after Greco-Roman goddesses, which somehow took me until now to realize.)