We’re thrilled to have a guest blog from global bestseller Eoin Colfer introducing the Fowl twins, the stars of his blockbusting new series, for readers aged 9+.
Over to Eoin to tell us all about them and the adventures they’ll be embarking on…
How does one describe the Fowl twins? In glowing terms is the answer to that. A few journalists have written critical articles detailing the eleven-year-old boys’ criminal activities and found themselves shipped off to inhospitable wastelands with only their regret for company. The twins are private individuals and do not like being reported upon. That is to say Myles is private. Beckett on the other hand will shout his intentions from the treetops, or rooftops or indeed clifftops as he adores both climbing and shouting. Beckett also loves trying to communicate with animals, holding his breath, standing on one foot and juggling goldfish, preferably all at the same time.
Myles is the thoughtful twin. He thinks long and hard about such things as stealing gold, amassing knowledge which can be converted to power, toppling governments of minor countries, toppling governments of major countries, and most of all finding out if there is any truth to his brother Artemis’s stories of several species of magical fairy folk living below the earth’s crust.
In appearance the twins have quite a lot in common; similar features, similar dimensions though Beckett is a little bulkier due to his various physical pursuits including the aforementioned climbing. Myles has a good appetite and a lifelong love of jelly snakes but his frame is slight which he believes is due to what he has dubbed his cranial burn theory which hypothesises that if a normal person burns in the region of three hundred calories per day thinking, then geniuses like himself probably burn at least a thousand due to increased brain activity.
Regarding the twins’ presentation to the world: Beckett cares not a fig for how he appears and often does not appear at all, and if he does it is usually in an unexpected place such as dangling from an overhead street lamp or popping out of a drain following a conversation with one rodent or another. Both twins dress in a uniform of sorts: Beckett in t-shirt and cargo shorts, pockets stuffed with his various collections of insects, interesting pebbles, his action figures, broken crayons and a crushed juice box or two which may have a dribble left in the end. Myles’s uniform is more on the formal side. Like his brother Artemis before him, Myles favours black suits which he 3D prints every morning then recycles before bed, and so people who don’t know him naturally assume that he is on his way to a funeral. The outfit is topped off with Myles’s spectacles which are in fact smart glasses that house both a powerful graphene processor and the Nano Artificial Neural Network Intelligence system, or NANNI, which Artemis had designed to keep an eye on the twins. Myles naturally had hacked the system in under an hour and re-tasked it to assist him in investigating Artemis’s fairy tales.
In point of fact the twins are about to find out that there is quite a lot of truth to their big brother’s stories when they befriend both a tiny troll, who Beckett will for a ridiculous reason decide to name Whistle Blower, and the pixel (pixie-elf hybrid) Specialist Lazuli Heitz who is flying her first practise mission in Fowl airspace for the Lower Elements fairy police force. These meetings would have made for a perfect day, satisfying as they did Beckett’s thirst for new friends and Myles’s desire for knowledge, had they not been ruined by an interrogator nun, Sister Jeronima of Bilbao who was intent on mentally dissecting the twins’ brains, and an immortalist duke, Sir Teddy Bleedham Drye, who was intent on actually dissecting the troll’s brain in lab experiments.
The Fowl twins are forced to go on the run across Europe and it will require every ounce of Beckett’s strength and every point of Myles’s prodigious IQ to deliver them safely from the clutches of those who would do their new fairy friends and their human protectors harm.
