**Not too spoilery, there may be one or two things that aren't present in the official premise, but you discover them fairly quickly anyway.**
I have truly grown fond of the Artemis Fowl series since I first read it as a child, which is probably the reason why I can go back and read the first four books in the series, despite the younger age demographic and slightly juvenile writing. The first four books were great fun to read because they had charm and they made enough sense for me to suspend reality and just enjoy it. *This* book, however, jumped the shark...enormously.
First off, Colfer practically shoves his environmentalist views on the reader the entire time. Though this isn't exactly new to the series, and it's not always a terrible thing, subtlety is the key. This book is about as subtle as an oil tanker crashing into a field of baby seals. My God, the antagonist in this book is so one sided, so hilariously evil, that there is no facet of his personality or plan that the reader can even understand, never mind sympathize with. Colfer's one attempt at giving this eco-terrorist a motive, ambiguity, humanity...fails horribly. The fact that so much of the plot rests on this man's shoulders makes my heart ache.
Let's move on to the second problem with this book, the one that the title implies: A Time Paradox. Time Paradox, indeed. In this book, Artemis and Holly must go back in time to change the past, because, as we all know, Artemis was kind of a douche when he was younger, and he made a ruthless deal with the...*shudder*...Extinctionists, whose goal is to make most animals in the world extinct. Why? Who knows? (It is actually explained in the book, and it has to do with some convoluted utilitarian philosophy that made me want to throw the book out the window in disbelief). So this deal happened and the one thing that could have saved his mother was extinguished from the world by his own doing. How poetic...and also dismally contrived. I mean, really, what are the chances? There's no magic or fate or anything, it's just by pure frickin' coincidence. Anyway...throughout the book, there are several interactions between the future Artemis and Holly and past characters. This is dangerous, dangerous territory. Some authors do this well, many do not, and one can guess by my tone that I don't think Colfer executed this trope very well...at all. When you retroactively add scenes into a universe, which is obviously what he did, it has to make sense; some detail from the earlier books should come into place that makes the reader go "huh, I guess that's why that happened", or something like that, but NO. These isolated interactions are just there, they are never fully explained, the reader says to him or herself "Wow, they should really be effing up the space-time continuum" but...nope, guess not.
I don't have much to say about the characters, except that some of them have strange traits that were never mentioned before in any of the five books before it, therefore adding nothing to the story and, actually, retracting from it by ruining the immersion. For example, Holly cricks her neck to the side to do magic. It's just a thing she does. Oh, really? Well, thanks for never mentioning it in any of the previous books. This may seem small but it is important. Always establish basic character traits off the bat. Major changes, even outright betrayal, etc. That's fair game for future books (as long as it makes sense in the context of the story). It's called character development. Little stuff like this, don't bother if you didn't establish it in the first place. It's irking, and it makes me feel like I don't really know the characters anymore. One thing I have to say about the book, though, is the baffling and unexpected romance that springs up. It's a bit weird, to say the least, but it piqued my interest, so there you go.
This book...I can't say I had huge expectations after reading the last one (which I was also fairly disappointed in), but I did not anticipate such a heartbreakingly bad book. I don't know what happened, but I am seriously bummed out, because although I love these characters and grew up with them, I truly can't get past how badly I hate the writing in this book. Reading many of these reviews, most people seemed to like it, which I don't really understand but it's cool that other people are satisfied with it, I guess. I just wish I hadn't invested such a chunk of myself into this book series that turned into something that I despise. I guess I'll always have the first four, though, and that'll have to be enough.