Gabrielle Zevin: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022, Knopf Incorporated, Alfred A.)
English language
Published July 7, 2022 by Knopf Incorporated, Alfred A..
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 …
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.
The characters and their relationship as it evolves over time are the highlight of this book. It's a great tale of a strong friendship as it ebbs and flows over the decades. Felt very real and very human. I appreciated it for how much it made me consider my life and relationships.
The overall plotline and where it ends up are less compelling. I liked it but wouldn't read it again.
This is one of those books that attracts you from the very beginning and you can't stop reading (until you realise that you don't want it to end that soon, either!). An interesting and well-written story that follows the successes and failures of its complex characters, driven by their passion for video games and full of lights and shadows. This is a story about gamers, and video games. But it also about life, passion, success and failure but, above all, about human relationships, and lives and worlds that could be but are not. Like a video game with the greatest engine: our imagination. Like a book.
