Sadie and Sam met as tweens and bonded over video games in a hospital common room in LA. After a falling out, they run into each other across the country in Boston where they attend separate colleges, where they begin their decades long collaboration. Sometimes friends, sometimes family, and sometimes enemies, their story unfolds and morphs over triumphs and loss both personally and professionally.

I really enjoyed this one. The story is captivating and the characters unique and realistic. Sadie and Sam both have huge hearts and huge flaws. My one major critique was that it was too long. By the end it felt like too much at the beginning and a tapering off at the end.

Overall, I would recommend regardless of whether you like video games or not.

This was one of the best books I've read in a while. I didn't get lost in the gamer-speak and all of the characters felt real. They weren't all likable, in fact, many of them (Sadie and Sam) are hard to stand at times. The story was well paced and I didn't see certain things coming. I couldn't put this book down.

Perhaps the best book I've read in years. Amid the shadow of gamers, is the real game that we call life. Except there's no refresh button as the characters grow to understand. I loved how even the heroine Sadie is responsible for her own issues and judgements, and as fallible as the others.

I know this book has received rave reviews and I wanted to love it and give it 5 stars It was hard for me to get into the gaming aspects of the book. It is the relationships of the main characters that felt so real to me and that I enjoyed exploring. The book explores many topics including identity, success, failure and the need to have real connections in life.

Such a beautiful, well-written book. There is so much video game nostalgia sprinkled into a book about friendship and love.

What an absolutely stunning novel. The more I read, the more I realize novels about friendships are the most special to me … that is, if they’re done right. And this one is epic. Sadie & Sam (& Marx!) are characters I’ll carry with me forever, & I’ll likely revisit them in the future. I wish I was still in college so I could somehow write a paper or thesis on the relationship between Sadie & Sam for an English class. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t cry several times throughout. Oh, & my work on a computer graphics client made me feel VERY smart while reading this.

Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this eARC. I have done some gaming over the years, but I would not say I'm a big gamer. However, one does not have to know anything about video games to enjoy this book. It's really a love story but not a "rip off your clothes, full of sex" love story. It's the story of 2 kids who meet in the hospital and develop a friendship that lasts decades. Due to the fact that this friendship lasting decades, if you grew up during the 90s, you get to relive this time period through these characters.
Overall, I would recommend this book if you are looking for a book that takes you through all the feelings that an enduring friendship does.

TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW truly deserves all the hype, this book was astounding. I had been seeing this book in circulation all summer, so I was super elated to be able to read it. Gabrielle Zevin has created a masterpiece with this story. All of the components, including the characters, world-building, and plot truly fell off the page--and I could not put this book down until it was complete. I am so happy that this book is getting the attention it deeply deserves, and I cannot wait to see what Zevin writes next!

Oh wow this book was just incredible. It was so beautifully written with characters I fell in love with so quickly.

I knew I'd love it the second I started reading and was reccomending it to friends when I was only 2 chapters in! I just knew it would be everything I wanted and hoped it would be.

It was a very slow read for me which was weird as I'm normally a fast reader but, I genuinely think I was rationing letting myself read it so it could last longer.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a book hangover like this. I somehow loved this book and hated the characters all at once.

I really enjoyed “The Storied Life of AJ Fikry” and so I was looking forward to this latest novel. I must say I started this book with some trepidation because I knew it was heavy on the video game theme.
As it turned out, I didn’t love this book like I hoped I would. It wasn’t the video game portion that got to me, instead I thought the overall storyline was rather dull and I grew tired of Sam and Sadie’s ongoing relationship.

Stunning and emotive prose, brilliant and layered characters, heartbreakingly beautiful story, and imagery that still lingers with me long after I turned the last page. There is a reason why this book has shot to the top of everyone's list. It is without a doubt a masterpiece.

this is a difficult book to summarize. it has been categorized as a romance, but I don’t think that’s accurate. this book is only kind of a love story. this tells the story of Sadie and Sam, childhood best friends who bonded over their love of video games, who go on to make a successful video game company and several very popular games. their relationships go through many difficulties throughout the decades this book spans, and they always come back to video games as a way to make sense of the world and heal.

I love video games. I always have. as soon as there was an Oregon Trail joke on the third page, I was hooked. I fell in love with these characters immediately. the problem is, I didn’t stay in love with them. I KNOW that this book is supposed to highlight the complexities of people, that these characters were not meant to be perfect, but I found them so hard to love towards the end of the book. this book also just had. SO. MUCH. PAIN. and trauma. this is literally a book about trauma. at a certain point it just felt like, can we give these people a break? please????? that’s the main reason I don’t feel like I can give this 5⭐️, because I just ended this feeling like there was so much pain for the sake of pain and plot in this. still, Zevin did something truly spectacular with this book. it’s like nothing I’ve ever read and I really thought it was brilliant. the creativity that went in to each game they created and why, and what it represented and meant for them… brilliant.

This book. No. Not for me. Got 50% but I just keep trying to have nothing to show for this book other than resentment. When I first started this book it felt like a chore to get into it. I didn't like the characters and everyone has this odd way of talking. Were we in a Wes Anderson movie and I didn't know it?

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for this advanced copy of the book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Lots of people loved this one, so I know I’m in the minority. I think I’m just not the right audience for this book. Felt too long and drawn out to me.

I received this in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley.

I am unfortunately late to review this book so there isn’t much that hasn’t already been said. I really enjoyed the world building and the saga of these character’s lives. I felt like I lived things alongside them. It was emotional and raw and real, with two flawed main characters. I was frustrated at a lot of their decisions, especially when it came to their friendship with each other. Ultimately I was sad it was over. I will say I think I would have liked this book more had I read it before it became so buzzy.

This book is getting so much attention I am not sure another review is necessary but I enjoyed this story despite its do-over type plot.

Had a great discussion on this in book club the other day. <i>Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow</i> is a very solid entry into contemporary literary fiction. It's very well written, and once the story got momentum (about halfway through) it was really engaging and hard to put down. It has four stars for the quality of the writing and how evocative the last 1/3 or so is. (Listen, I'm a crier. And I cried for at least the last 1/3-1/4 of this book.) Once the big thing happens (no spoilers, you'll know when you get to it), the rest of the book carries itself through very nicely and keeps a tight grip on your heart as it goes.

That being said, the writing, for me, is maybe a little <i>too</i> literary. While discussing with a friend in book club who is much more well-read in literature and the classics, and teaches literature and writing, I realized how many allusions had completely gone over my head. Not saying you need to be a Shakespearean scholar to enjoy this book, but I bet it helps. The main sticking point for me in terms of writing, though, was the vocabulary. This book has a bad case of thesaurusitis. Sure, there were words I had seen before a million years ago and would never remember the definition of, and I don't mind looking those up. But honestly, using "<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jejune">jejune</a>" in a contemporary novel feels like a parody of purple prose.

The writing also falls prey to this Internet-age tendency to write for Kindle highlights. You know, when you're reading a book and Kindle helpfully tells you that 1,109 other people highlighted this passage, so you assume it has some universal appeal or truth because, well, why else would it be a popular highlight? Full disclosure, I read this as an ARC, so I didn't get that lovely feature in this book since Kindle seems to do it only for publisher versions of books. But there's still this sense that the author is trying very hard to write something deeply profound that will get highlighted and excerpted and shared - all while, ideally, keeping to about 280 characters.

Those are literally both from the first chapter of the book. They were the first two highlights I made, along with a note for myself: 🙄 It's also where I gave up on highlighting the bits I found try-hard:
<ul>
<li>"Time was mathematically explicable; it was the heart—the part of the brain represented by the heart—that was the mystery." 121 characters, em dashes and all!</li>
<li>"Sam looked at Sadie, and he thought, This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time." 234 characters. And because [book:How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe|7726420] is one of my all-time favorite books, I added the note "ok charles yu give us nothing"</li>
</ul>

I'm not even going to get into the complete mangling of discussion on cultural appropriation and childhood trauma. Both really just boil down to the sentiment that "in the 90s no one cared about these things and life was better" — read: in the 90s, no one spoke up about these things and life was easier for white/straight/cis male people. For a book that's very adamant on exposing the sexism in the games industry, it's honestly just a weird mishmash of stances to have.

Apparently this is one of those reviews where I change my star rating by the end of it, because I think I'm officially giving three stars. Looking back, I think the end really influenced my initial rating because I was so emotionally affected by the plot and some really beautiful writing in that one part (those two parts, I guess (no spoilers!): the second person chapters, and the Oregon Trail section). Holistically, though, this is really solid literary fiction, but ultimately I think it tries too hard. I can definitely see this as being a symptom of a young writer and I will say I'll keep an eye on Gabrielle Zevin's future work, because I think she can mature into a real literary fiction powerhouse.

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley. Thanks Netgalley! Sorry I didn't get to read it until several months after publication!

Everything about this novel is realistic in such a painful way. The flawed characters, grief, chronic illness—the ugly sides of friendship. Mostly you know the characters are on a collision course to disaster, and you have no choice but to sit back and watch the implosion. It employs so many rarer narrative techniques in isolation (i.e. a single chapter in second person), and spectacular callbacks dropped in little moments: a line from a poem, a poster from decades ago, giving the characters the kind of depth you'd expect of a real lifetime.

One of the best books I've read in years. The years long relationships as the characters navigate high school, college and beyond. I found myself rooting for Sam, Marx and Sadie at different times.