Eoin Colfer is an excellent author.  I don’t know how to pronounce his name, but that hasn’t stopped me from reading 9 of his books now.  My first introduction to Colfer was the Artemis Fowl series, which as of book 6, is still immensely entertaining.  I was afraid to pick up anything else by him, assuming it couldn’t live up to the high expectations I had from the Artemis books.  Eventually I gave in and listened to Airman.  It was, quite possibly, even better than any and all of the Artemis books.

Even with Airman surpassing my wildest expectations I was shocked with how much I enjoyed Half Moon Investigations (more on this later – I just finished listening to this on cd).  With all that said, when I learned that Colfer was writing the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, I was probably more excited than most Hitchhiker’s fans.  I was confident that Colfer could pull it off.  He is, without a doubt, a talented, funny author.

I didn’t like And Another Thing, and that makes me sad.  As I read through it, I wanted to like it.  I really did.  And it definitely made me laugh, numerous times and not infrequently or out of pity.  It really had its moments.  But in spite of that, it just wasn’t very good.  It was middling, and not nearly of the quality of his other books.  There are many possible reasons for this, and I explore them in more detail in the database entry, but I simply can’t recommend this to anyone.  Colfer has much better books out there, and the original Hitchhiker’s books are plentiful if you need a fix.

(On a side note, I think there is a good chance that I wouldn’t even enjoy the original series at this point, for whatever reason, and that Colfer in fact did a fantastic job of upholding the tradition established by Adams.  Maybe it’s not just for me anymore.)

Full database entry on And Another Thing… Beware spoilers.