Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Reviewed by GGGinny

What I drank: I went to the gym today and celebrated with half a bottle of rose. It’s been wonderful being very very lazy this evening.

Goodreads Overview:

In this exhilarating novel, 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.

Drunk Overview: Sam and Sadie and Marx meet when they’re young and decide to build video games together. The story truly revolves around Sadie and Sam and their history, the way they build games together, and the way a relationship grows as people move to different eras of their own lives.

Drunk Thoughts: I don’t have enough good things to say about this book.

• I was worried for a good half of this book that there would be a romance plot that I was going to HATE and without details, I was quite pleased with how this particular plot point ended.
• Okay, now to teh real stuff. I loved the way this book let the main characters be messy.
• Specifically Sam and Sadie; they can be petty and stupid and mean but it always makes sense for their character and the book.
• Especially when they’re younger. the moments where someone things “well I just won’t talk to them” may be a little to real from my past.
• But at the same time that they’re infuriatingly imperfect, there are these beautiful moments, like a particular callback to Shakespeare (that frankly happens regularly throughout the book), some of the most beautiful heartfelt-gestures of love, and discussions incredibly moving discussions of grief.
• and because this book spans something like 30 years, the book covers so many different eras: not being able to contact someone with a cell phone, 9/11, the rise of “personalities” in the video game industry, and a whole slew of different styles of games and gameplay.
• As someone who really enjoys videos games but doesn’t understood how they’re created, this book was also a blast.
• The descriptions of the games that Sam and Sadie make are fantastic, to the point where I wish I could actually have a chance to play them myself.
• Slight tangent. There’s a piece of advice on the internet that the way to write an expert is to give them a very specific and strong opinion on something no one outside of the industry knows or cares about, and dear god this book did a great job.
• Even more than that, the things people decided to be picky about did such a good job with their characterization.
• There’s another game designer who acts as a bit of a mentor and it becomes so clear so quickly exactly what his personality is. And it’s fun in the way where I would never want to interact with him in the real world. Which is what made him such an interesting character in a book.
• And Marx.
• Legit, I’m half in love with Marx.
• Let’s be honest, he was too perfect from the beginning. The kind of guy who sees two people who are too smart for their own good and goes, ahh, I am now in charge of keeping them alive, somewhat healthy, and ideally happy.
• He’s the glue that really allowed Sam and Sadie to let their genius fly.
• this book actually feels like a non-traditional love story.
• It’s an ode to the people in your life that are more important than you can put itnto words, the people who helped create your personality and your goals and ambitions. Often people who can push you to the greatest heights while also absolutely ruining you.
• I think the most beautiful thing about this book was the way things seemed to come together a at the right time, even if they had broken down or would break down again.
• There was a cyclical pattern to it, the same kind of pattenter that seems to actually happen in real life.
• Different marriages affected the way different characters looked at marriage. The same event remembered by different people led to widly different outcomes.
• I know at this point that what I’m saying probably doesn’t make much sense
• But boy does this book have me babblnig incoherently.
• It’s only been a week and I’m already tempted to reread this.
• How do you live with the lies you tell yourself to cover up a harmful truth until you can’t lie to yourself anymore, and what does it mean that you can do that.
• How do you handle a persona who has grown larger than you can handle?
• And it’s brilliant how the video games help give that structure.
• Each video game gives you this insight into the characters who created it; not just who they were in the moment, but also those base parts of the person, the things that are hard-wired in that you can’t change.
• Another aisde. I don’t care for Shakespeare. I know this astounds some people. But dear god, this book made me want to revisit some of his work.
• Obviously the title came from Shakespeare. But there’s a bcallback towards the end of a book to a scene from the beginning that hit me like a sack of bricks and have left a mark on my brain the way a sack of bricks would leave a bruise on my body.
• It’s one of those moments of kindness I mentioned before, a moment of grief and understanding what it can take to survive.
• Parts of this review are so vague that I can’t tell how valuable this will be to anyone, but I just don’t want to spoil anything.
• This is a book I was told to read by so many people, and I can be combative and try to hate something for being popular (not my best trait, I hapipily admit), but this book exceeded my expectations and if it sounds like something you’d be interested in in any way. I highly suggest reading it.

What it Pairs With: Veuve Clicqout – something meant to be savored but enjoyed more than once

Rating: 5/5