I'm not really sure how I felt about this overall. I loved the premise, and I really liked the video game sequences. But the characters were almost uniformly flat, dull, and lifeless. Most of the time, they seemed to be walking info dumps rather than actual characters in a story. I also had issues with the pacing - the first 200+ pages were almost a chore to get through, and then the last 100 pages lays out the majority of the plot like a Thanksgiving dinner. But I can't deny that the book puts forth some really interesting ideas, and I'll definitely continue with the series at some point to see where it goes from here.