REVIEW:

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow I will still be thinking about this brilliant book.

Fair warning that I am predisposed to adore coming-of-age novels about protagonists of my generation (Gen X), apparently even if I don’t have much in common with them other than birth year. In this case, the protagonists are Sadie and Sam, two friends whose lives intertwine up, down, and around their love of gaming.

It must be said that this book is VERY MUCH about video games. Sadie and Sam play them, talk about them, design them, and promote them over the span of thirty years. What a testament to author Gabrielle Zevin’s writing that I could be glued to the pages of a story about a topic that typically bores me to tears! Because I loved Sadie and Sam so much, I never lost interest in their worlds - either the real one of their day-to-day existence or the virtual ones they were building.

They are, without a doubt in my mind, the two characters I’ve cared about the most over the past decade of my reading life.

I do say that with a bit of trepidation, as I know some readers of this review who love me will want to read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow to meet my new literary best friends. I must therefore point out that while the novel is a masterpiece in my eyes, some people are not going to be able to get through it. Zevin is a fan of obscure words, there are risky techniques used (such as an occasional second-person chapter and dropping readers into a video game world), sad and unsavory things happen in the plot, and the text is fairly dense. This is a long 416 pages.

Also, having read (and enjoyed) Zevin’s previous two novels, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry and Young Jane Young, this feels like it’s from an entirely different author. I breezed through those others in a day, but Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow took me a week. I know that’s because I savored every word and often reread entire paragraphs, but that’s my point. If her prior books were hamburgers, this one is a steak.

I feel a bit bad for the upcoming books I’ll be reading in the wake of this novel, since I know nothing will compare for a very long time. In case it’s not clear enough already, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow has a well-earned place on my all-time favorites shelf. When you finish the final page of a book and hug it to your chest, where else would it go?

My sincere thanks to the author and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for the advance reading copy via NetGalley. The expected US publication date is July 12, 2022.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

Let the games begin! From the New York Times best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry - a glorious and immersive novel about two childhood friends, once estranged, who reunite as adults to create video games, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives.

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. They borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo, a game where players can escape the confines of a body and the betrayals of a heart, and where death means nothing more than a chance to restart and play again. This is the story of the perfect worlds Sam and Sadie build, the imperfect world they live in, and of everything that comes after success: Money. Fame. Duplicity. Tragedy.

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, games as artform, technology and the human experience, 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.