Review: Ready Player One

When I first heard about the upcoming Ready Player One, I was excited but hesitant. A story that is based around nostalgia for a certain time period (here, the 1980s) can be tricky. Things can go either very well or very poorly.

I was barely a chapter in, though, when I realized that author Ernest Cline had everything under control. Ready Player One grabbed me and didn't let go, and the 80's nostalgia was both integral to the plot and perfectly handled.

The story itself is not a new concept: a super-rich guy dies and leaves clues within his creation that could lead the intrepid to his fortune. The Westing Game, a childhood favorite of mine, features the exact same story (more 80's nostalgia, perhaps?). What is unique is the setting - OASIS (the internet turned virtual reality world) - and the rules of the world that govern "game play" and the search for the fortune itself.

Our faithful narrator is Wade (gamer tag Parzival), a high school student who devotes all of his time to hunting for famed OASIS creator (and recluse) James Halliday's fortune. Born decades after the 1980's, this kid spends all of his time obsessively watching movies and TV shows and playing video games that would probably have been considered passe if Halliday hadn't built his contest around them. Instead, after deciphering a clue that has remained unsolved for 5 years, Parzival suddenly finds himself among the most elite players in the world.

Parzival is wickedly smart, pulling connections between references out of his mind with astonishing regularity. But where he falters is with personal communication. There is, of course, a message here - as we increasingly spend our time online, our inter-personal relationships can suffer. But for Z (as his friends call him), determining who is actually your friend when you're all fighting for control of billions of dollars is harder than it may seem.

Do you need to be as well-versed in the 1980s as the characters to enjoy this book? No, not at all. I was born at the beginning of the 80s, and I know I'm even too young to fully understand many of the references. But that doesn't detract from the book at all. The details make the book more enjoyable, sure (I laughed out loud at the bit about how Cory Doctorow and Wil Wheaton were co-presidents of OASIS), but they're not going to hold someone back from loving the fast-paced adventure, sharp humor, and surprisingly well-formed characters (considering the characters are themselves a shadow of their real life counterparts).

If I could give this book 6 stars, I would. Maybe it's time to rethink how I grant stars? 5/5 stars

Divergent

Hmm, where to start with Divergent . I got my hands on an advanced copy of this book about a month before it was released, and even then, the hype was pretty huge. Everything I read was insanely positive, and I had high hopes that this was going to be something more than a weak Hunger Games copy.

At the start of the book, though, I had a hard time caring all that much. Beatrice lives in a society where everyone is split into one of five factions based on personality traits: Abnegation (selflessness), Candor (honesty), Erudite (intelligence), Amity (peacefulness), or Dauntless (bravery). As a teenager, everyone chooses their faction, but it is rare that anyone leaves the faction in which they've been raised (presumably because those traits would be so hardwired into them by then). Beatrice quickly learns that she is a Divergent (although she doesn't really learn what that means), and she must decide whether to stay in Abnegation or choose another path.

Wouldn't be much of a book if she stayed in Abnegation, now would it?

I really wanted to like this book from the very beginning, but the strictness of the faction traits kept getting in the way. I kept wondering (probably aloud) to myself how this society could reach a place where everyone was so one-dimensional and how it could continue to stay like that. It wasn't until about halfway through the book when anyone within the book seemed to ask these same questions (coincidentally, this is about when I started to enjoy the book).

Also, a majority of the book was something of a training montage, as Beatrice (Tris, now) learns the ways of another faction. If (should I say when?) this gets made into a movie, they would be well-served to make this a total of five minutes. Thank God for cut scenes. I didn't need to read about every instance of her learning to be less selfless.

But like I said, about halfway through the book, the story really starts to pick up, and I found myself as captivated as I had hoped I would be. Tris' burgeoning romance picks up (don't worry, moms, it's very clean and tasteful), and she also starts to learn that maybe the factions aren't as clear-cut as she thought. I finally found myself in her shoes, and I couldn't wait to see where the story was going.

The climax of the story comes along quickly - almost too quickly, considering how much time was wasted on the aforementioned training - and I was left with an ending that did nothing but set up the next book. The story arc's conclusion felt too brief for a book that is almost 500 pages. Of course, I'm still interested in what happens next and will be waiting for the next book, but there could have been a better sense of closure.

Final thoughts? It's an interesting concept for a dystopia, and Roth's writing is strong and compelling. If it were a little shorter, though, it might have made for a stronger story.

4/5 stars

Ship Breaker

I've been hearing such amazing things about author Paolo Bacigalupi for a while now, and I walk by his novel The Windup Girl every day. When his YA novel Ship Breaker came up on the list for our YA book group, I was happy to have a reason to finally read him.

And can I say how happy I am that I did? Less than half-way through Ship Breaker, I had to buy a copy of Windup Girl because I loved his writing so much. His descriptions of a world in which the environment is battling back against us and people work in harsh conditions make everything seem disturbingly real.

Nailer, our protagonist, lives and works on a beach on the Louisiana coast, scuttling through ducts on a grounded oil tanker, dragging costly metals like copper back to the surface to sell. When a city killer storm (the kind of storm that has made this world rebuild New Orleans three times) rolls through and the beach community gets destroyed, Nailer and his friend Pima venture down the beach to see what washed up during the storm. What they find, though, is one of the nicest ships they've ever seen, a true bounty of scavengable material. Of course, they find something more precious than even they expected, and then Nailer is forced to leave the only home he's ever known to protect it.

There are many things going for this novel. First, the main character is a boy, so rare in well-written YA. Second, there are no creatures to deal with (genetically-designed half men aside), and the frighteningly real environment and plain human nature are the things that cause trouble. Third, this is a world that it is easy to imagine could come about, and thinking through how we could get from here to there is a great exercise for kids. There needs to be more of this in YA - good, straightforward sci-fi storytelling.

5/5 stars

The Road

I love dystopian fiction - the grittiness, by definition, highlights aspects of human nature that don't often appear in other genres. So when I heard about Cormack McCarthy's The Road, I was excited - a man and boy walk towards what they hope is (relative) safety. Everything I've read about the book has hailed it as a post-apocalyptic masterpiece - it was even an Oprah book (which, in most cases, is a mark against in my book) and is being made into a movie.

So imagine my disappoint when I read something like this:

Whats that?
Where?
There. Theres a house.
I’ll go take a look. Take the gun.
No, I’m scared.
I know.
What if the bad guys come?
You can come with me youd like.
The man knew he wouldnt want to be alone.
Okay.
Okay.

Note that this is not the text of the book, but it's so damn close, it's hard to tell. I mean, I was expecting some great masterpiece, but all I got a rough sketch of a story with sporadic punctuation and meaningless dialogue. The most interesting parts of the story - mainly, when the man and boy encounter others - were also the most difficult parts to read, as adding more voices than the narrator, the man, and the boy without any indication of who was speaking made it much too confusing. And even if the story and dialogue had been stronger, I don't think I could have looked past the grammar - why use apostrophes in some places but not others! It's maddening, like McCarthy just simply couldn't be bothered to adhere to any rules.