Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Publication: Knopf (July 5, 2022)
Description: 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.
My Thoughts: This story was an intriguing exploration of friendships wrapped around the rise of the video game industry. It spans about thirty years beginning with Sophie Green, who is eleven and hanging around the hospital where her sister is being treated for leukemia, meets Sam Masur who is in the hospital for one of many surgeries on his damaged foot sustained in a car accident that killed his mother. They are two lonely, bright children who bond over playing computer games. But the friendship is broken when Sam learns that Sadie has been keeping track of the hours they spend together - more than 600 of them - for the community service portion of her Bat Mitzvah. He feels betrayed and they don't speak for years.
They meet again as college students with her at MIT and him at Harvard. She's in a gaming class and somehow the two of them decided to make a game together with the assistance of Sam's Roommate Marx. When the game Ichigo is a hit, the three of them form a company to make and market their games.
Along the way, they all have personal successes and failures and business successes and failures. Their friendships wax and wane. Even though each of the characters was a deeply flawed personality, I enjoyed learning about them and watching them grow and change over the years.
The story had a complex timeline with lots of changes of viewpoint and lots of flashbacks. Each was more fascinating than the last. Sam's chronic pain was woven throughout the story and helped define his personality. Sadie suffered from bouts of depression. Marx was the most normal though he was dealing with his own issues too.
The story was filled with issues from the chauvinism Sadie faces as a female game developer to Sam and Marx's Asian heritages to each character's basic loneliness and feelings of isolation.
It is a hard book to describe since it is a story of long friendships and love in many forms, and it is a story about work in a field that makes many demands on those in it. I enjoyed this book very much.
Favorite Quote:"What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever."
I received this one in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley.
You can buy your copy here.
