Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline 2 stars (5 for the audio performance)

[Karin]

Audio performance - 5 stars
Story - 2 stars
Average - 2 stars

Once again, Wil Wheaton has improved the story, but not enough to give this more than three stars. Sure, I was warned by GR friends' reviews that this was a disappointing sequel, which is why I waited for the audiobook to show up at my library just to check it out. Now, had I not had low expectations, I would have enjoyed this far less; as it was, there were moments I enjoyed it.

As many have said, there were too many similarities to the first. To top that off, I am really not a fan of some of the newer things in this novel, and will put some of my complaints in a spoiler at the end. Bear in mind that the first book got 4 stars from me on audio.

The words of a fellow reviewer put this better than I will Nicole D. wrote "Top that off with Ernest Cline wanting to address EVERY. CAUSE. HE'S. EVER. HAD. A. THOUGHT. ABOUT." If you check her review to see more, you'll see she wasn't dissing this, but saying how it was overdone. In my words, it was overkill to the point where there were times where I felt like I was in a lecture hall and not listening to a novel--it completely took me out of the novel, although, to be frank, there were a few other times that happened as well.

In the interests of fairness, I would like to point out that most of my GR friends rated this 3 or 4 stars, but I don't think we're being curmudgeons, just disappointed. For the most part, we rated the first book higher.

(view spoiler)[I was irked by some of the inanity that happens before this book happened and the lameness of this new technology--some things were just so utterly predictable with this ONI technology, such as those huge files being people's entire minds stored on a computer. But then I am extremely skeptical of that because brains don't function in binary code and I cannot believe one can scan someone's brain and personality, etc., this way, nor am I confident that this will every happen.

I was also annoyed with the blatant obviousness of some of the things that happened, but also some of the challenges were just not interesting to me at all. I think the first book was better, even though it only got 4 stars for me because of Wil Wheaton.

I'll stop here, because I don't have enough room in a review to tell all, and no doubt I am already forgetting things since I listened to this in the van over about three weeks and was reading a number of other books in between. I didn't read this to remember a lot of it, just to know what happened next. (hide spoiler)]

[Joi]

100% agree. I'm glad I went in with low expectations, ended up giving it a 3.

[Karin]

Joi wrote: "100% agree. I'm glad I went in with low expectations, ended up giving it a 3."

I was in no rush to listen to it, but started it for a February group read. As you can see, I was behind ;).

[Steven]

I felt that Cline spent way too much time in this volume going into the detail of the different worlds/games during the challenges and not nearly enough on the interactions and the relationships of and between the characters. I will say that I did enjoy the last few chapters where I felt the story picked up, and he left off with an intriguing premise for a third in the series.