The year is 2045, there are practically no natural resources left on Earth, so the population of the planet is trying to go online. To do this, a large-scale multiverse game simulator was created with the OASIS multiplayer mode: he turned on the game, created an avatar, put on a suit for better control and can live, study and work sitting in one place in front of a laptop screen.
The game becomes even more popular after its creator James Halliday dies: the tycoon recorded a posthumous video in which he told that he hid an Easter egg in the world of the OASIS, and the player who found it will get his inheritance and full power over the online world. Actually, the whole plot of "Get ready for the First player" is a story about how an orphan from Oklahoma, Wade Watts, with the nickname Persifal, is trying to find an Easter egg and save her life not only in a computer game, but also in reality.
As for me, any quest is interesting only when you are able to complete it, and if it is a text quest, then the reader should become an "accomplice" for the hero: not just to read about how the riddles are solved by another, but still try to put forward some assumptions and understand the logic of the narrative.
There is practically no such reader for the "First Player to get ready", there are jokes here "for their own", and even Klein himself will probably be able to count these on the fingers of two hands, they all gather annually at geek conventions dedicated to the fiction of the 70s-80s. So the most important thing that the reader should do before opening this book is to accept in advance that he has a passive role in store for him, the maximum that he will have to do is worry about the life and health of the characters.
However, even here a hitch came out: the narrative in this case is led by Wade himself, and we find out on the very first pages that he is alive and well, and came out of the story with the Easter egg winner. Honestly, I have nothing against copyright spoilers, when the plot in the book is not the most important thing, but that's it... what else could be interesting in young adult literature? Philosophical thoughts? A rich syllable? In general, I leave it on the conscience of Ernest Klein.
Unlike the recently read Philip Reeve's novel "Mortal Machines", whose characters have remained cardboard dummies for me, everything is very good in this regard: Wade Watts himself is not a deep character, but he is very charismatic, with a sense of humor, besides, Cline turned out to be a supporter of body positivity, so readers who pick up this novel will have to spend a couple of evenings in the company of a pimply chubby teenager who is embarrassed to talk with persons of the opposite sex.
Let's say no to these Hollywood beauties, from whom girls fall in stacks in both directions! Of course, this is not so fresh for teenage fiction, after all, high school students who lead a sedentary lifestyle and stick to the monitor for hours should see something in common between themselves and the hero of the book.
Plot... well, it all depends on how much you love computer games, because most of the novel takes place just in the OASIS world, and our hero is either going through another quest, or chatting in a chat room with his friends (of course, he also talks about the game for a reason).
In fact, the whole book is built from the same type of schematic episodes: the hero gets a "riddle" - the hero breaks his head - the hero guessed where to go and what to do - the hero goes and does - what the hero does leads to something in reality (for example, competitors want to kill him by finding an egg). I have not singled out anything super interesting for myself, all this running around the OASIS is interesting only from the point of view of how the artistic world drawn by the author looks, even though it is not real even within the framework of the novel.
If you try to go beyond the plot and tell what the "First player to get ready" is about, then words and phrases such as "love", "friendship" and "reality is more important than virtuality" will inevitably pop up. And if everything is clear with the first two, a rare book for teenagers does without instilling eternal values in the younger generation (and yes, if this is fiction, then most likely our hero is an orphan or is about to become one, so it doesn't work out very well with the family somehow), then I would like to stop at the last one.
Until the last chapter, I read the book and thought: "how cool is it that the author shares with the reader what he really loves, tries to arouse interest, and not just earns loot. And figs with him that Ernest Kline loves old computer games most of all, after all, games, books and movies are just different versions of everyday escapism and ways to pass the time."
But under the finale, a moralizing insert that completely does not fit with everything else, such as: games are games, but go to reality and live there. Well, it's like taking a children's book about rainbow concepts and attributing to it a fabled morality at the end - and the morality will not work, and spoil the sweetness about concepts with this, there will be no former charm and childlike spontaneity in it.
In general, I didn't get into the book, but because of the manner of telling chosen by Klein, at least it wasn't that it wasn't interesting to read at all: the hero is cute, there is where to smile, with a particularly strong desire, you can equate the book world of 2045 and our reality, in which virtuality also occupies quite a large place.
337.891 SRY