I think I read an older edition, so I can't speak for whatever the current preface might say, but I found it a quite easy read and enjoyed it a fair bit. I had wanted a book that went into details I wasn't already familiar with, and this gave me that. In particular, the details of the oxygen levels and their impact on animal evolution was something I had been curious about. I also liked the discussion of microbe evolution, although I was already familiar with things like some organisms acquiring photosynthesis by swallowing other organisms with photosynthesis who had swallowed other organisms with photosynthesis like some sort of living Russian doll. In my opinion, people who are only interested in animals because they are like us are boring and unimaginative.

As noted by another reviewer, the fast developments in the field have made this slightly outdated. We now know a lot more about Ediacarian fauna and what they were. Progress has been made on the question of making RNA nucleotides, as well:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170519083636.htm
https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i18/first-nucleotides-might-formed-Earth.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8833103/

A very minor critique is that at the very end the author suggests religion and science don't have to be at odds. That might be true for the set of facts that science as-is currently suggests, being that there is no currently published accepted scientific theory of the origin of the big bang, but as a philosophy religion and science are inherently at odds (one being to take things on faith, the other being to test things via experiment and prediction), and it seems a bit presumptuous to assume that science will never make a theory guessing about the origins of the universe which it will then wish to decide by scientific testing and not via faith. When/if that happens, science and religion will have a fundamental clash the likes we have never seen before.
I would hope people would resolve it in a kind and understanding manner of one another, but people have repeatedly disappointed me.