I listened to an audio version of this book narrated by Will Wheaton. The narration was excellent and kept me listening even when I was cringing a several points in the plot. This was a fun story, but you needed to suspend your belief and then suspend it again. Even though one of the recurring themes is how unbelievable the events of the story are; there was a whole higher level of disbelief I needed to engage in. It was a little difficult to figure out who the target reader was intended to be. I grew up in the 1970s, so I got most of the music/video/gaming references. For much of the middle of the book, I thought the story was definitely written for a current 16 to 18 year old male audience who wouldn't get the numerous cultural references from their parents' childhood. At times the protagonist was whiney and immature enough to make me root for the aliens. There was plenty of well-written action to carry the book through its weak points. The ending completed the plot, but wasn't totally satisfactory to me.