After listening to the first few pages I wanted to stop. Wade was such a dork making such obviously stupid but significant choices. However, the tension soon subsided during the long introduction of the scene (including a recap of the significant facts from the first book). In the end, the book was filled with many twists and turns and ended up merging the game world with the real world in some pretty ingenious ways - like how the real world controlled avatars sitting in rigs that controlled real-world robots.
Additionally, the book had multiple surprises that changed the perspective and opened up new ideas about saving memories and capturing the concept that ultimately our being/soul is just physics so why not be able to capture it and reconstitute it in an online world.
My only criticism was that the speed with which Samantha (Art3mis) forgave wade without any reconciliation seemed a bit silly, but in the end, it wasn't that significant a piece of the puzzle that it can be overlooked.