Gabrielle Zevin is the New York Times and internationally best-selling author of several critically acclaimed novels, including The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, which won the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award and the Japan Booksellers' Award, among other honors, and Young Jane Young, which won the Southern Book Prize. Her novels have been translated into thirty-nine languages. She has also written books for young readers, including the award-winning Elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles. You can find her online at gabriellezevin.com.
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.
When I bought this book, the salesperson at Barnes and Noble told me that when he picked this book up, he was wary of the video game elements, but that the book is really about the friendships between the main characters. I'd heard the book described this way already, and it rings true. The story follows three friends through thirty years of their lives. Their relationships are complicated and realistic—they don't always speak to one another, they have a deep connection, they lie and cheat and love. Zevin captures the humanity of relationships within the pages of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and that's what makes it such a wonderful love story.
One of my favorite parts of this book is how the characters aren't always likable, if they even ever are. Zevin shares at the very beginning of the book that people are complicated, but that when we engage with stories, we tend to take those characters at face-value. I felt like this was an introduction to the characters we were about to meet. Sam, Sadie, and Marx aren't perfect, and they can't be taken at face-value. So much of the story revolves around the perceptions these individuals have of the others, which often means that recollections of events are skewed and their pride is misplaced. In fact, they are unreliable as narrators because of this, I enjoyed the story so much more. Like in how Zevin captures the humanity of relationships, she does this because she is able to capture the individual human experience so well.
This book will absolutely appeal to people who play video games, but as someone who doesn't, I can say I was never overwhelmed by what I didn't know while reading, because Zevin makes this world really accessible. The story, too, has really creative elements embedded, to make you feel part of this world. This includes small interview snippets with different characters across time, repeated motifs, and even chapters that are narrated as if you're playing a video game. Each of these elements add to the overall creativity of the story, and make you feel even more immersed in the complicated lives of these characters. It was a world I didn't want to leave.
I hardly feel like I need to tell people to check this novel out, since I feel late to the game, but if you haven't read it yet, it's absolutely worth the read. You can find more from Zevin online at gabriellezevin.com.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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