By Ava Shaffer
“How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky?”
Synopsis
In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry 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.
Read This Book If You…
5 stars
Enjoyed Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
Yearn for a bit of 90s nostalgia
Play video games
Want to read about smart, complex, messy people
Are searching a book about all different types of love, but that isn’t the main plot
Have a bit of a nerdy side
Spoiler Free Review
THIS BOOK!!!! I don’t know how I knew but about three chapters in I could already tell this would become one of my favorite books. And it is!
As a romantic, I was rooting for Sadie & Sam the whole time. I love a good book about longing and pining and yearning, and although there were exquisite details of that here, that’s not what love was in this story. The way love is portrayed in this book felt more real than those stereotypes I tend to read. It wasn’t bubblegum or overly pessimistic of love, but instead somewhere in the middle. I’m not sure how else to explain it besides that it felt like three-dimensional love.
"To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand"
I was also so impressed and moved by the way time worked in this story. The way the chapters jumped around perspective and nonlinear timeline felt so seamless and right. The experience of recognizing details from earlier in the narrative was incredible. I can’t imagine how much work was put into this story to make the time seem so easy and natural. I just loved reading it.
And the characters!!! The main ones and the side ones all felt so well developed like you could tell the writer put a great deal of care into each and every one of them. I loved and hated the same characters at different times and it was such an experience to follow them through all the levels of life. I felt like I had spent so much time with them and grew to care so deeply for them. In reality, I only spent 400 pages with these characters, but I feel like I’ve known them for a lifetime.
I know I could gush about this book forever but for now I’ll just reiterate that I am very happy to have found a new book to add to my favorites. I’m excited to buy the paperback when it comes out, where I will no doubt reread it, drying up entire pens underlining my favorite lines.
“He had spent hours sitting next to her, playing games and then making them, staring at her hands as her fingers flew across a keyboard or jabbed at a controller. Tell me I don’t know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don’t know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.”
Another Review I Really Loved:
The New York Times, How To Design a Beautiful, Cruel Universe
*Synopsis and book cover credit to GoodReads
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