Eoin Colfer gained his fame by writing the popular series Artemis Fowl about a twelve year old criminal mastermind. He’s written several other non-series books including The Wish List, about a teenage girl named Meg Finn who is killed and must help someone she attempted to rob in order to find her place in Heaven, and Half Moon Investigations, a non-fantasy novel about a 12 year old who is an online graduate of a private detective academy. Most recently, Colfer has released an authorized addition to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy” called And Another Thing…

Despite the general appeal of all his other books (which I’ve been thinking of perusing anyway), Airman was the first that really grabbed my attention and had me thirsting for more. Conor Broekhart was born in a hot air balloon while it was being shot down by unseen enemies. It would seem that the child was born for flight and adventure, and the novel delivers both well and equally. Under the supervision of a Frenchman who is friend to his father and king, Conor learns to fight and invent with the freedom of science at a very young age. It would seem that life is too good to be true: He has his mother, the scientist, his father, the fighter, and his Princess Isabella, who never really comes into her own character, but is nevertheless necessary as a part of Conor’s life. But, as with most stories set in these worlds, there is also the king’s Marshall, Bonvilain, who is plotting to take the throne and won’t let anyone, not even a young inventor, get in his way.

This book was written either by someone who really loved Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia and found great inspiration from those and other magical books when he decided to write this, someone who really hated Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia and decided to show the world how ridiculously easy it is to write a magical adventure book, or doesn’t really care one way or the other and wanted to make a pretty penny because those books are popular and someone might pick it up and not care that it’s annoyingly similar. No, really, without knowing much background about the author or his motivations for the book (and I’m too lazy to look into it, feel free to do the research for me and comment :P), it’s too similar to not be intentional one way or the other. I just can’t tell if it’s a tribute or mockery.

Working in used books with a strict trade-in policy, I don’t get much exposure to general fiction that comes out in hardcover. We generally only take the already popular authors, the ones that are sworn to sell (Patterson, Hooper, Balogh, whatever), so when I saw this on the shelf I thought it would be a nice change of pace. Me? Read a new hardback book? It’s usually unheard of. Lately I’ve been into magical tales of wonder and adventure, but primarily kids’ magical tales of wonder and adventure; The Magicians appeared to jump out at me as something that might get me back into adult reading. (Not that there’s anything wrong with kids reading, and I plan to do a lot of it presently, but every so often you do miss seeing the word ‘fuck’ in print, I’m not going to lie.)