Ready Player One by Ernest Line (audiobook)

genre: young adult dystopia

Wade lives in a not-so-future world in which hope is hard to find.  Desperate and gray, it's not hard to understand why Wade much prefers leaving the real world to spend his time in The Oasis - a virtual reality universe that nearly everyone in the world can access and where you can be anyone you want.  Part video-game and part social interactive platform, the Oasis is worlds upon worlds to explore.  And when the man responsible for its creation dies, he posthumously announces a contest to win his fortune.  Wade's life is never the same as he devotes himself to a study of this one individual and the decade he adores, the 80s, in order to have a fighting chance at winning the biggest prize the world has ever seen.

I'm giving it 5 stars.  I can't believe I liked it that much, but I did.   I put off trying this book for so long because I have a hard time with teenage male protagonists, in general (not fair, I know, but there you are) but this one really captured my attention from the start.  Yes, it helps that I grew up in the 80s and the pop culture references were beyond fun.  But it's also a rollickingly adventurous story.  It's intense and incredibly creative.  It kept me guessing and made me feel things, and although it lulled a tiny bit in the middle, by the final third I was practically on the edge of my seat, wondering how it would all shake down.  I found myself thinking about the "virtual" world that I, too, spend a lot of my time in and I appreciated the overall message of the novel, about how as amazing as the virtual world we can create are, we do actually need real people in our lives. 

note to parents: language, some discussion of sexual topics