Back

reviewed Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline (Ready Player One, #2)

Ernest Cline: Ready Player Two (Hardcover, 2020, Ballantine Books) 3 stars

An unexpected quest. Two worlds at stake. Are you ready?

Days after Oasis founder James …

Review of 'Ready Player Two' on 'Goodreads'

2 stars

If you didn't like Ready Player One just don't even bother with this - that should go without saying. And Ready Player One wasn't a perfect book - it has rightly received some call-outs for not the best writing and a very male-teen-centric view of 80s gatekeeping. Still, I really enjoyed it and the 80s nostalgia (being a child of the 80s myself), so I was happy to grab this book when I saw it available on the local library app.

Sadly it doesn't live up to the first book. Yes, there's still a heavy dose of 80s nostalgia, but we did that already, and just piles more of it does not a good book make. Wade is no longer a scrappy underdog we can root for but is now an Elon-Musk-esque billionaire with EXTREMELY alarming views about data privacy and protection, or total lack thereof. A new quest appears in the OASIS and a new urgent reason to complete it, and most of the book is now the "High Five" gang reassembling to chase down the seven Shards of the Siren against a deadline. The challenges for each shard are more of the same we saw in book one, minutae of 80s trivia, but since we've seen it before, not as much fun. (Plus the section on Prince ... wow. Did we REALLY need 100 pages - three CHAPTERS - of detailed Prince questing obscurity? I for one certainly did not.)

Then the ending seemed very forced and unbelieveable. Don't want to include any spoilers but in brief, Anorak's behaviour didn't make a lot of sense, Wade's decisions are EXTREMELY problematic regarding privacy, data protection, and all sorts of related areas, and somehow magically everyone ends up forgiving their differences without apparently seeming to resolve anything or really grow as people. Hmmm.

I'm sure Wil Wheaton will make the audiobook fun to listen to, but sadly this didn't live up to the first one. It felt forced, a mix of fan service and self-justification, that never really dug into any of the actually potentially interesting issues that it could have touched on.