Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

By Gabrielle Zevin

  • Release Date: 2022-07-05
  • Genre: Literary
Score: 4.5
4.5
From 1,705 Ratings

Description

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • Sam and Sadie—two college friends, often in love, but never lovers—become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. It is a love story, but not one you have read before.

"Delightful and absorbing." —The New York Times • "Utterly brilliant." —John Green

 
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, GoodReads, Oprah Daily

 From the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: 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 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.

Reviews

  • What Goes Unsaid

    5
    By Richard Bakare
    Gabrielle Zevin left no stone unturned, bandage in-place, or social trope in her inventory while delivering an electric novel. Books like this are as complete a dialogue about life and all of its pain, joy, and the mess in-between. Like a reflection in an indigo lake, her characters fascination with being gamers, mirrors why some of us are readers. Though we see events from many stages of life, it’s Zevin’s exploration of the uncertainty and anxiety of youth that serves as a driving theme in the story. Specifically, the almost violent point where the idealized perceptions of youth meet the compromising reality and judgements of the world. On a deeper level we see how the singular passion of youth occasionally manifests as creative genius. For many there is a treasure chest of topics to enjoy in the video gaming world she builds for us. Including the highs, lows, and intricacies of the gamer’s experience. I am particularly enthralled by Zevin’s leveraging video games as a larger representation of every fascinating and depressing thing about the real world. We are challenged to weigh the pros and cons between the two “realities” and how we face life in each. Zevin’s voice and characterizations are refreshing and hard to shake. Her style crafts the kind of story that puts the joy in reading. It’s the book you wish could write and our glad to have read. Her masterful use of the omnipotent perspective gives us characters with real depth and dynamic qualities. The themes blend perfectly together pulling us from one revelation to another. As Zevin clearly states this book is a love song in many respects. A love song to artists and makers as well as the creative process. For me it was a reminder that life is for living, here and now. That if we are present and fully engaged we will see the magnificence of being and, when the end comes, exude the gratefulness that it happened at all.
  • What If?

    5
    By Easterner1
    The story was well-conceived, and shared with the reader many of the dimensions of the gaming, and the creative, experience. It did so honestly, and paralleled Fikry’s style of rich and complicated people intersecting and drifting apart. It was easy to locate oneself in the text. Those intersections where richly-imagined characters met were the primary focus of the writing, and threw sparks while they invited the sharing of paths. The novel blurred the boundaries between the lived and the imagined, and preferred neither. This was a tale worth telling.
  • Meh

    2
    By Anonymous205
    This felt like a saga to me - like, there’s no big rising action to a big payout in the end. It’s more little stories cobbled together over years and stays pretty flat. Maybe you’re into that sort of thing. It’s just not something I enjoy. Then, add to that, characters that aren’t really likeable and an oddly-rushed ending, and I was just glad it was over. I grew up in this time period and expected to love it because it was about video games, but I guess I was expecting something more like Ready Player One. Oh well.
  • Boring, unless you are into video games

    1
    By KathyNYC
    Moved too slow. I skipped chapters to move it along. I wouldn’t have continued if it was not for my book club. Maybe for people in their 20s & 30s I am in my 60s and found it impossibly boring
  • Beautifully Written, Poetic, and Wonderful

    5
    By anabzy
    From the world building of the video games to the complex and ultimately devastatingly real and beautiful relationships to the characters, this will stay with you. If you buy something, buy this book.
  • Everyone should read this book

    5
    By Beth Kmore
    Wonderful. Going to read it for a second time. The writer is incredible.
  • What could have been….

    2
    By V.L.L - Book Lover
    So…there were moments of greatness and here but weighed down by filler inconsequential information! Love the theme of love and friendship and various forms it can morph into. But he excess and heavily gamer jargon was a wet blanket to a great story of lasting friendship.
  • Fell flat

    1
    By #Friz
    Started great then fell very flat and boring half way through. The characters never resolved their issues with one another. Felt like the author decided to make political statements in the middle of the novel.
  • Great start, but died off

    1
    By Kbototy
    This book was interesting to start but for majority of it, it felt like I was just reading a timeline of a gaming company. Nothing felt significant or made me want to continue reading. The battle between Sadie and Sam just became annoying and I lost my interest in the characters…
  • Wow

    5
    By Jada Haymon
    Just gorgeous.