Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

October 27, 2022 7:10 AM

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.

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.

posted by Stanczyk (5 comments total)

I read this and I enjoyed most of it, but I realize it has not stuck with me as much as most books that are this long. I see that Fikry came out as movie this year, so I am going to watch it before I decide to read the book or not. I did like Zevin's book Elsewhere, but I find the same issue, I don't remember much about the actual story.
posted by soelo at 11:11 AM on November 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

This book destroyed me.
posted by danhon at 4:11 PM on November 22, 2022 [2 favorites]

So I really liked this book as I was reading it, but at the end when thinking back on it I feel emotionally manipulated. The story was nice, but the constant raising of the emotional stakes started to turn me off around Sadie's seemingly deliberate misreading of Sam's intentions.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:06 AM on December 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

I just read this book for a book club, and came away not entirely sure if I enjoyed it or not. I definitely responded to it emotionally (by basically crying through the last third of the book), but there were times when it read more like a plot synopsis than a novel. I did finish it within a day without intending to, though, so that says something!
posted by quatsch at 10:33 AM on February 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was completely sucked in by the writing. I am not a video game person, but I really enjoyed reading the process of how the video game developers came up with a story line for their games. It was also interesting to see the tension between how strongly the developers felt about their games, and the reaction to the games from the consumers. I also liked reading about real-life spots in Los Angeles. I went down a few wikipedia rabbit holes because of this.

Like Literaryhero, I felt a bit turned off by Sadie's resentment toward Sam, but I strongly suspect Sadie is sort of a stand-in for the author. In that vein, I wondered if Zevin was trying to work out her own demons with that storyline. Just a thought.
posted by BeBoth at 11:14 AM on August 24, 2023