My wife started reading it and despite somewhat-negative comments from me beforehand, she's enjoying it.

I think this might be a bit like sight-impaired people encountering an elephant. We come at something like this from different vectors, with differing expectations. With my sort of unconscious expectations and backgrounds, I was far from impressed, but given where it is on the best-seller list and my own spouses impression so far, clearly there are a lot of people who like the book!