My Review:
Epic. I never imagined a novel about gaming would be so beautiful.
There is a lot to unpack in this novel. Readers have noted the book’s length but I only had the length of the audiobook to go by – a hefty (for me) 13 hours and 51 minutes. But for someone who always speeds up the narration, I savored this one at normal speed. The narrators Jennifer Kim and, briefly, Julian Cihi were outstanding.
The novel follows the lives of video game creators Sadie and Sam over the course of three decades. They are not lovers even though the book is about love. They are intricately bound by lifelong friendship and understanding. They meet as children when Sam is recovering from a serious auto accident and Sadie is visiting her sister in the hospital. The spend hours playing video games until they have a huge fight and Sam stops speaking to Sadie.
Years later, they meet again in college and then become superstars in the gaming world after designing a game called “Ichigo”. There is much intricate detail about the design and launch of video games but it is fascinating. And of course the author also discusses the obstacles faced by women in the game industry. I began to understand the fascination and obsession that designers have with creating these games.
“I love that world more, I think, because it is perfectible. Because I have perfected it. The actual world is the random garbage fire it always is. There’s not a goddamn thing I can do about the actual world’s code.”
There are several subplots that are as equally fascinating as Sam and Sadie. Their best friend Marx becomes an early supporter of their fledgling videogame company (and is what’s called a “NPC”, in gaming lingo a nonplaying character in the story). There are also flashbacks to Sam’s growing up with his Korean grandparents in L.A. and the influence they had in his life. There is even a storyline about a new game that pops up in the last part of the book that was so good, I listened to those chapters twice.
My only connection to gaming is that I have two kids (now adults) who are both pretty serious gamers. But this book gave me real insight into the hearts and minds of gamers and the designers who create the video games that fascinate millions of people.
Zevin has mused why it’s easier to express things though play than it is in real life. She said that play means being vulnerable and being open, but sadly play often ends when you become an adult. I find this to be so insightful! One of the characters in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow says, “We work through our pain. That’s what we do. We put the pain into the work and the work becomes better.”
One final point. I appreciated the representation in this book. Sadie is Jewish and Sam is Korean-American and disabled. The author herself is Korean and Jewish. The final part of this book ripped my heart out but the ending is absolutely beautiful. This is a messy, complicated, romantic, emotional and funny story that should not be missed.
“What is a game? Marx said. “It’s tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption.”
(Thank you to the publisher and Libro.fm for the audiobook listening copy. All opinions are my own.)
About the Book:
In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry 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.
