I loved The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. I read it when it first came out, and it stuck with me. I’ve now recently re-read it and loved it almost as much, and I’ve even watched the film (twice) and found that mostly successful. And yet, I hadn’t read any of Zevin’s other books. I’ve no real reason why – I think I even owned a couple of her books that sat unread on my shelves until I eventually gave up on them and unhauled them. And then Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow came out and seemed to take the reading world by storm. It didn’t immediately appeal to me. I’m not that interested in video games, so the premise isn’t one that I organically connected with. But in the back of my mind I kept thinking about how Ready Player One wasn’t immediately a match for my interests either, and that ended up being a favourite of mine. So I decided to give this one a try and see what all the fuss was about.
This is an interesting story. Not just because of the actual plot (though that is well constructed and executed), but because of how the relationships are handled. The two main characters aren’t, as you might immediately expect, romantically connected. But their bond goes, in some ways, even deeper. They met in a hospital – Sadie was there because her sister was a patient, and Sam was there because he had been injured. The two are each struggling to cope with their situations, and neither has much interest in discussing them. So they play video games. Over time, this develops into a friendship, and one that serves to provide each with something they desperately need.
The book is ostensibly about how the two meet again later in life and embark on a project that will turn into one of the most successful video games ever to be created and launches them into a meteoric rise. And it is that. But at its core it is about so much more – it’s about how relationships must stretch, break and mend to span lives, it’s about how we can become the centre of one another’s worlds without even noticing it happening, and it’s about the limits we each much discover in our ability to forgive, heal and try again.
There was a lot that I loved in this book. I devoured it in only a couple of days, and it was one of those books that made me forget I was reading. It’s very well written, and the concept of it is so successfully rendered. Our two main characters are developed – they grow, change, have flaws and learn about themselves. But the secondary characters are also interesting and fully realized, which is always important to me in a novel. I’m glad I decided to give this book a chance despite my knee-jerk initial lack of interest. It does what I need my reading experiences to do – it shows the reader some essential parts of what it is to be human, and it does so with grace. So if you’re wavering about whether this book is for you, particularly if the topic of video games is turning you off, I’d say give it a chance. It just might surprise you!
In this exhilarating novel, two friends–often in love, but never lovers–come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before. – Goodreads
Book Title: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook/Paperback
Published By: Knopf
Released: July 5, 2022
Genre: Fiction, Relationships, Illness/Injury, Video Games
Pages: 401
Date Read: December 21-23, 2022
Rating: 7/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.23/5 (429,116 ratings)