So my daughter had to read the 2nd Artemis Fowl book for a book report (she had to pick one from the teacher’s bookshelf, so she randomly grabbed that one). Reading the critic’s descriptions on the back of the book, it sounds like they thought it was the funniest thing ever.
My daughter did not find it funny.
I read the first 30 pages last night. If not for the blurbs on the back of the book, I would never had guessed that this book was even intended to be funny. What am I missing? It seemed like a not very good at all fantasy or sci fi book. I didn’t see un-funny jokes; I just didn’t see anything that I thought I was even intended to laugh at . Does this book actually get funny at some point?
( I don’t intend to finish reading it, I’m just curious)
I haven’t read them and have no interest but that series sells like hotcakes here, funny or nay.
I read the first one - it was mediocre. Funny it was not. If I had nothing else to read I might read the others, but it didn’t catch me enough to get me to be a fan.
They’re okayish, but I’m not nuts about them. I read the first two or three, and tried to read something else by the same author and hated it. YMMV, of course.
Agreed. Nothing in the first one made me want to read the others. If there was humor, it was pretty low key.
I bought and read the first two books because they were touted as the next Harry Potter, but I didn’t like them. Not at all funny or appealing.
I’ve read the first 3 or so, and they really require you to follow the series to understand it, but it’s not really a funny sort of book (unless you happen to think 10 year old criminal masterminds are amusing).
It was just an entertaining read, but it’s about as funny as Harry Potter I, which is to say, not really that much. It’s just fantasy/sci-fi with a technological twist, but I never got the impression from any of them that they’re meant to be actually comedic books.
Ditto, someone recommended them to my kid a few years ago when he was going through Harry Potter withdrawal, and neither one of us thought much of it really.
Funny? I did not see a lot of humor.
#1 son loved these books, but he never said they were funny. 
Lesson: don’t believe what you read on jacket blurbs? Lemony Snicket didn’t live up to its blurbs, either. (and just sort of ended).
My son loved these as well- the humor was subtle and dry, not laugh out loud funny. I liked them, my daughter did NOT (emphatically!).
I’m a big Lemony Snicket fan–at least, reading one of them is good. All 13, not so much: they get kind of trippy after awhile, but it’s the sort of trippy you get when you’ve been up too long and you really just need to go to sleep.
If you’re going through Harry Potter withdrawal and you want stellar, reasonably funny children’s fantasy, you can’t do better than Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, starting with The Book of Three. They’re quite dark in places, but they’ve got excellent comic moments as well.
I read Artemis Fowl and, like others, was underwhelmed.
Daniel
I read Artemis Fowl when it first came out, and I don’t believe I found it funny or even memorable. The gimmick was that it appropriated/parodied a lot of techno-thrillerish imagery, plot, etc. and threw in fantasy creatures, which wasn’t especially funny to me. I gave up on the book somewhere near the end of a long,tedious action sequence culminating in a fart joke with a dwarf. :rolleyes:
Didn’t go near the sequels, and I don’t plan to even look at the author’s zombie Hitchhiker’s Guide sequel.
Like others have said, I didn’t find it remotely funny. I couldn’t even get halfway through the first book.
I’d suggest the Percy Jackson books for those going through Harry Potter withdrawal. Not as fun, but pretty fun, and way better than Colfer.
That’s why I was so horrified at the thought of Colfer taking over Hitchhiker’s Guide. Blech.
Yep. The books are the print equivalent of brainless action movies, but with genre-bending incongruities. I think they’re classified as “funny” or “comic fantasy” so that they doesn’t have to be believable or take-seriously-able.
The books are not funny, they are dull. Which is why people are up in arms that this author is writing a continuation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide.
I made it to 3/4 of the way through book 1. I didn’t like it very much and certainly didn’t find it funny.
I agree—my daughter has read most of Harry Potter, and I’ve got her on the second book of the Prydain chronicles, which I loved as a kid. Unfortunately, none of these were on the teacher’s book shelf. I just couldn’t understand why all the critics on the book jacket used words like ‘hysterical’ to describe this book.
The other annoying thing is that the teacher won’t let her use any book that’s been made into a movie. She reads a lot, but “The Black Caudron” that she’s reading is out now, thanks to Disney. She’s looking forward to Huckleberry Finn next, but can’t use it for a report.
See your problem was you thought the blurbs were using definition 6 when they really were meaning it as definition 3 to describe thier reaction to having had to read the book. 