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Ready Player Two (Ready Player One #2)
Ernest Cline
An unexpected quest. Two worlds at stake. Are you ready?
Days after Oasis founder James Halliday’s contest, Wade Watts makes a discovery that changes everything. Hidden within Halliday’s vault, waiting for his heir to find, lies a technological advancement that will once again change the world and make the Oasis a thousand times more wondrous, and addictive, than even Wade dreamed possible. With it comes a new riddle and a new quest. A last Easter egg from Halliday, hinting at a mysterious prize. And an unexpected, impossibly powerful, and dangerous new rival awaits, one who will kill millions to get what he wants. Wade’s life and the future of the Oasis are again at stake, but this time the fate of humanity also hangs in the balance.
-Excerpt taken from Goodreads.
Check Goodreads to see the book’s ratings.
My Opinion
(2.5 / 5) I loved Ready Player One. It was unique and adventurous and so fun. This one did not elicit the same feelings. I found myself bored many times and not wanting to continue.
Wade finds a device that Halliday left behind that blows OASIS out of the water. It’s better, it’s more interactive and it’s more addictive. It definitely brought an exciting element in and a new quest is revealed. It had all the feels of book 1. Then an AI aspect is introduced and that lost it for me. The AI was not realistic enough, which sounds funny but RP1 was so great because it wasn’t too far-fetched. It was just enough to stretch the mind without being ludicrous. This one, to me, was too much. It lost the wave I’d been riding and my attention waned.
The saving factor was the nostalgia. It really was great to see a lot of 80’s movies (shout out to John Hughes!) and the music. Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller and Some Kind of Wonderful made me giddy with excitement. Prince? Not so much. But if I didn’t know those movies very well, I would’ve been very bored in those chapters. He went into a lot of detail with Prince and John Hughes movies which is great if you know those, but if you don’t, it’s just not as fun.
It also didn’t feel YA at all. With Wade and his friends being 18+ they were getting married, having kids and worried about their careers. The YA aspect was gone and may not appeal to the same audience.
I believe book 1 is good as a standalone. I really don’t think book 2 was necessary but I see why he’d want to ride the train of popularity and money. However, the humor fell flat and the nostalgia was mostly used up in book 1. It was fun at times but not enough for me to recommend to others.
Content Summary: there is violence but it is mostly virtual (in the OASIS) and it was done with creatures and avatars so I didn’t deem it as worthy to write down since no physical harm was actually happening. Sex was talked about (there are new virtual options to experience different kinds of sex) but no real details. Language was high just like book 1.
Detailed Content Review
Language
F***- 27
H***- 30
S***- 52
A**- 20
B****- 4
D***- 6
Bas****- 1
Religious Cursing
J****- 8
Chr***- 3
G**- 14
L***-
Derogatory terms etc-
Morons
Dick
Mother pus bucket
Alcohol, Drugs, Smoking
With ONI, you could experience drug use without putting the drugs in your body.
A young woman pulls a bag of marajuana out of a locker.
A young man passes many parties at houses where many teens are drunk. A young woman drinks beer and falls over.
A young woman bribes a young man to do something for a bag of marajuana.
A man smokes a cigarette.
A young man takes drugs virtually. He gets the high but no side effects.
Intimacy, Sex, Immodesty
*Medium LGBTQ+ aspects included* There are LGBTQ+ characters but not a lot of detail goes into their lives.
A woman is engaged to a woman.
A young man sees computers files he can experience that are labeled, “SEX-F-F” and “SEX-M-F” and “SEX-nonbinary.” He decides to skip over these cause “cheating is cheating” and he just lost his virginity to his girlfriend. They both lost their virginity to each other 3 days after their first kiss. No details. But many people do try out sex with a different gender or as a different gender.
Porn was popular with the new way to “experience “ other people’s lives. You could “have any kind of sex.”
There is a recording of a 50 person orgy where all fifty simultaneously record do others can experience.
People refer to Parzival as “Penisville.”
A young woman mimes jerking off as a snarky response.
A woman was designated a male at birth. She legally changed her gender at 16.
A young man has had virtosex as a woman with a woman, sex with a man as a man and a woman, straight, gay and nonbinary sex.
Virtually, people are able to have sex with anyone as any gender.
A young man stops in front of a bedroom door and remembers this is where he slept with his girlfriend for the first time and a few times after that.
A young woman kisses a young man.
A dance club has a vulva-shaped entrance (women’s genitals) in a place called Erotic City.
A young woman kisses a young man.
Violence, Weapons, Crime, Blood
While people are plugged into ONI, serial killers, rapists, thieves and more search them out.
A man holds a gun and a taser to a man. He shocks the man with the taser.
In a game, a young woman cuts off a young man’s head with a sword. The head goes flying and smacks loudly into lockers. The body and head fade away. The young woman wipes his blood off her sword.
A young woman runs into a virtual house with guns. Shots and a grenade are heard. She later holds a gun to young men.
An elderly man is taken hostage.
A man holds a gun to a man. The man threatens to kill another man. A man is shot in the forehead. His body falls backward as he shoots a man in the gut.
Robots shoot at a group of people, they shoot back. A young man uses guns and heat-seeking missions to fight off robots. A man is dead, “shot to pieces.”
Potentially Intense Themes
A woman jumps out of a plane and it crashes into the ground. Drone footage shows the area incinerated with fire spreading rapidly. At least a dozen charred bodies are seen.
A young man’s mom, previously overdosed on drugs and died. He found her dead on the couch when he was eleven.
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Ugh – sorry this one fell far short of the first book. Especially when you guys were so excited for it!
Yeah all that gender on gender crap tossed it for me, I felt like it was lost nostalgia mixed with liberal progressive agenda BS, hard DNF for me. Not YA appropriate at all
I felt like the majority of the book felt adult so I’m hoping it was mistagged as YA. *Facepalm*
I don’t think I’ll be reading this one. Most people that I follow really didn’t like it!