"Chalk-and-cheese twins, plus a troll on the run, and a knife-wielding nun equals double the trouble for Artemis Fowl’s younger brothers. "
Fans of Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl novels will relish this action-packed, gadgets-a-go-go new series. In fact, this cracking book heralds a second cycle of Fowl escapades as the eponymous eleven-year-old Fowl Twins are none other than the younger siblings of Artemis himself. But only Myles bears any resemblance to the twins’ big bro. A stickler for dressing smart, Myles is smart in mind too, with an exceptional IQ and a penchant for taming his wild hair with special seaweed gel that nourishes both the hair and brain. Beckett, on the other hand, is more of a crash-bang-wallop kind of boy, and prone to sulk when forced to wear any kind of clothing. But it falls to them both to step into Artemis’s shoes when the fairy folk need help while he’s away.
As they bicker and irritate each other to hilarious effect, the twins are visited by a mysterious nun who sends Beckett’s imagination into overdrive: “Myles, it’s a nun with a helicopter! You hardly ever see that. This is the start of our first real adventure. It has to be - I can feel it in my elbows.” And he isn’t wrong, for it turns out that stylish Sister Jeronima of Bilbao is on a mission to prove that magic creatures really exist, and her “organisation has eyes everywhere.” Adding to the cast of jump-off-the-page characters, we meet the dastardly Duke of Scilly, who’s desperate to get his hands on the tiny troll Beckett finds near their fortress, and Lazuli, an ambitious pixie-elf hybrid known as a ‘pixel’.
Heady with high-stakes high jinks and high-octane action, this fiendishly funny firebrand of a book will keep kids reading long after the lights were supposed to be out. And when they’ve raced through this, they’ll be desperate to dive into book two, The Fowl Twins: Deny All Charges.