Described by its author as "Die Hard with fairies," the young adult fantasy Artemis Fowl burst onto the book scene in 2001, set to take over where the "Harry Potter" books left off and to make its creator, Irish schoolteacher Eoin Colfer, the new wunderkind of children's literature. As Kate Kellaway noted in the London Observer, a line from the novel about a boy in search of fairy gods--"Irish people skulking around rainbows hoping to win the supernatural lottery"---was prescient. Kellaway remarked, "What Eoin Colfer did not know at the time was that he was about to strike gold himself." Colfer's humorous, high-tech fantasy about a twelve year old who kidnaps a leprechaun started a bidding war among publishers, was optioned for a film, and has been projected as the first of a trilogy of novels about young Mr. Fowl. "It's just like a dream," Colfer told...