Review: Ready Player Two

Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My first question about this book was, did all the people who wrote bad reviews about this book actually read it? Okay, Ernie Cline is not the best writer ever, I doubt there will college courses taught on his works. However, with Ready Player One, he struck a cord, the story worked and he redefined the Cyberpunk genre for a generation. His second book Armada, fell very flat and was more or less a re-enactment of The Last Star Fighter. However, with Ready Player Two, he did regain most of his footing.

The weakest part of the book was the beginning, where Wade Watts is bringing us up to speed with what gas been happening over the last 3 years. This is fine, but way too much time was spent on it and it turns into a bit of slog as it is a lot like reading a Wikipeadia page at times. Cline could have easily compressed this down to maybe 6 pages and dropped anything else the reader needed along the way as it became necessary to know, instead it encompasses the first quarter of the book.

After that the story starts to pick up speed. We become engrossed by the new contest, a couple of the challenges are glossed over a bit, but several of them are quit fun to read. I was especially enjoyed the arena fight with the 7 aspects of the Purple One, Cline very obviously had fun writing this scene and I had a lot of fun reading it.

Over all, a good read, and a solid follow up to Ready Player One. If you are on the fence about reading it, I would say ignore the haters and go for it.

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