I struggled with this one so much. After seeing all the hype and praise, I expected to love it. But between the pacing and the complete apathy I felt for the main characters, I had no desire to continue with this book.

The story was beautiful and unexpected and thought provoking. It will stay with me for a very long time. It absolutely deserved the Goodreads Choice Award.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the ARC.

Loved this book! Messy, complicated, beautifully written. Very engaging and feels like an honest story or love, friendship, ego. Not a boon about video games. So much more….

So... Sam's mother, Marx's (his randomly assigned college roommate) mother, AND the lady who randomly jumped off a building in front of them are ALL named Anna Lee ??? Absolutely idiotic.

There are an infinite reasons I HATED this book. That is just one of many nonsensical, cheap examples.

I wish I could give it ZERO stars.

I didn’t hate nor love it. It was a very character driven book and I just couldn’t connect with the characters. There wasn’t really much of plot which left me disappointed.

I will be thinking about this book tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. This novel was complex, beautifully written, and extremely thought-provoking. While the book focuses heavily on video games, I didn’t feel like as though my reading experience was diminished as a non-gamer. Gabrielle Zevin perfectly captured the complexities of friendship and I grew to love all of the characters with all their flaws. What a book. 4.5 stars.

Thank you NetGalley for the digital advance readers copy of this book!

I really enjoyed this one. It did get a little video game production heavy at times , but otherwise I found it to be captivating and by the end I was deeply invested in the characters' relationship.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this book since I don’t and haven’t played video games before. But reading this book, you quickly realize that this isn’t a book about video games, it is actually about friendship. The two friends felt very real and I was on board and ready to root for their friendship, despite the bumps in the road. BUT, I gave up on this book at only 32% because there is a side character that I just Hate!! He is so… there is a long list (!) and he ruined the book for me (so sad). There may be a time in the future when I can handle it, but for now, this book lands in my DNF pile.

Thank you Netgalley for the e-Arc.
I'm honestly surprised how much I stuck through this despite getting bored nearly halfway through this book.
It's a beautiful story, and it is heartbreaking.
It's also not a typical love story. It's not the usual 3rd act break up type of story. It's actually a twist of women's fiction and literary fiction.
But I feel like you have to be the right type of person to truly appreciate this story, and sadly I'm not one of them.
I would try again when I am in my 30s,because mayhaps I'm not adult enough to truly take it for what it is.

I finally got around to reading this book. There was so much hype for it, I wasn’t such what to expect. The author does an excellent job of evolving the characters over a large time frame. I loved Markus character so much at the end of the book. However, there was some times where I was trying to figure out what was going on. I do tend to struggle with books where the POV shifts a lot between more than two characters. I feel like that is why this book was such a low rating for me. The ending was very good and made a big difference in my rating.

This one was chosen for my January book club read. I was both excited and nervous to read it. I know this one won the Goodreads award in 2022 and because of that I had high expectations. I really wanted to know if it was worth all of the buzz. I switched between the audiobook and reading the ebook. I found both formats to be fine and didn’t really have a preference except for the convenience of the audiobook.

It’s not you, it’s me? I guess since this book is so popular the issue must be with me. I didn’t love this book but I also didn’t hate it. It’s sad to say but I literally have zero thoughts on it. I thought it was just meh/okay. It started out good and I liked both characters but as it kept going and going and yes, going I lost interest in all of it. I am a huge gamer and that aspect didn’t even save it for me. I also did not care for the author’s writing and the word choices she made. Overall, I’d say give it a try because just because it wasn’t for me doesn’t mean you won’t love it. I am definitely looking forward to discussing it with my club.

Thank you so much to the publisher for the gifted copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Absolutely stunning. The beautiful writing had me gasping out loud, and I dare anyone who reads this not to fall in love with the characters. This is a book I will be gifting to everyone I know for a long time.

Great read! I am not a gamer so I hesitated before reading this book. After so many great reviews I dove in head first and was not disappointed. Such a unique story. I love the tale of a platonic relationship based on shared interests and lots of conflict. This is an absolute must read and I am so glad I decided to join the world and read this wonderful book.
Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my review.

I am torn on this book. I did not love it, but I did not hate it. I found the characters to be the same way. Clearly, I was rooting for Sam and Sadie to get together, but I have this intense dislike for books that spend the entire time going on again, and off again with their relationship – even a friendship. Despite my dislikes, I wanted to keep reading. I enjoyed their gaming relationship and was pleasantly surprised that that did not deter me. The jumping in timeline throughout felt like it took away from the fluidity and concentration. I felt like I never knew what year we were in unless the author expressly told me to point blank. It felt as though the author had this constant urge to stay woke throughout. I respect the intention, but it came across as a bit forced in places and just seemed like it was there to add length to the story.
I think it comes down to enjoying the first half of the book, but the second half kind of fell apart once they got the company started. Marx was apparently flawless, but I agree that he was an NPC. He was added to this story to provide yet another conflict between Sadie and Sam. The end was just not satisfying for me. Once I was in the last twenty or, so pages and she was having lunch with Dov again, I just rolled my eyes. As I said, I hate when books try to go for this secret romance angle and just end up playing this hot-and-cold scenario with the characters.
I just wanted to read this story of Sam and Sadie – Becoming friends, going to college together, working together, and happily ever after. But I guess the goal was for the parallel to that and to have your heartstrings pulled, but never be quite satisfied.

I didn't know what to expect with this one - I'd heard rave reviews but usually don't read books around fantasy or games or anything. I really enjoyed the style of writing. The author did a great job of bringing the video games to life. There were many different plot lines but I think for the most part everything came together really well.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Published: July 5, 2022
Genre: Realistic fiction; literary fiction
Trigger warnings: cancer, loss of a parent, gun violence
Rating: 5/5 stars – one of the best books of the year, very original story. You should read it and become friends with the characters.
Summary from Amazon
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER •WINNER OF THE GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD • Sam and Sadie—two college friends, often in love, but never lovers—become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. It is a love story, but not one you have read before.

"Delightful and absorbing." —The New York Times • "Utterly brilliant." —John Green

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, TIME, GoodReads, Oprah Daily

From the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: 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 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.

Review: Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet in a hospital when they are both 12 years old. They bond playing video games together as Sam recovers from a horrific car accident. Both are loners who love escaping into the worlds of the games. This is used often in the novel as a theme. This novel explores their platonic friendship over the course of over 30 years beginning with their fateful meeting in that hospital room. This is a novel I am still thinking about, and I am not even quite sure that I was able to fully comprehend and enjoy their story to the fullest – I have already contemplated reading this over again in the summer when there are less distractions. I was instantly sucked into the story of these characters and could not put this book down. I almost feel the author intended for the reader to fall in love with the characters as friends as one is reading their story – it is impossible not to like them or impossible to find fault with them and hate them in certain moments, similarly to what happens in a true friendship – those moments of deep love for one another or deep envy for one another. Gaming is also a main theme of this novel, and since I am not a regular gamer, I will say that the way it is added into the novel as a theme is compelling – the idea of world building, looking at things from a gaming point of view was refreshing and adds to the originality of this story. This book is a recommended read – I do not want to say much more about this book other than it is a must read – you will not be able to stop reading about these characters, the story was so realistic it made me forget that it was fiction and I was held captive in the world of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. (Yes, that is Shakespeare, yes I could not adequately tell you everything about this book in this cryptic review.)

When I started the book, I was a little nervous that it wouldn’t be my cup of tea, as there is a lot of dialogue and story around video games (e.g., ideas of games, producing them, playing them). I, however, loved this book.

The writing is exceptional. Although video games keep the plot moving, the story is about so much more than video games. It’s about friendship, love (romantic and non-romantic), grieving/loss, & much more.

The characters are incredibly lovable. The main three characters are Sam, Sadie, and Marx. Gabrielle Zevin does an exceptional job humanizing these characters, and I found myself rooting for all three of them. I have never liked this many characters in any book I’ve read.

The book is a long book, and it covers 3 decades. Although it may be daunting for some, the length enriches the characters and story.

This book has a lot of hype (e.g., the 2022 Goodreads Choice Awards Best Fiction & BOTM’s 2022 book of the year), and it certainly lives up to the hype.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for the ARC in return for an honest review.

I was not able to finish this book. I could not get interested in the story enough to keep reading. I made it about 40% of the way through and decided to DNF because this book was not for me.

This novel has been in print for awhile, and recently a friend suggested, demanded actually, that I read this novel because the stories in this novel were so gripping. There were 80 people on the waitlist before me, so I thought I'd see if it was still available with NetGalley, and lo and behold, the next day I was granted a copy.

Not being a gamer, when I started this novel, I found it rather plot driven. As a former public school teacher and English professor, I thought about how high school students would like this story about these two young kids meeting at a hospital and playing video games together. Then the characters grow older, and I thought, I can see young adults really loving this novel. But my friend and I are in our sixties, and neither of us were gamers, so I texted him to see what he really liked and he sent a postcard in the mail to say he had to explain himself and that he found the book enthralling early on boy meets girl, boy doesn't get girl plot, and that his daughter in her thirties was home for the holidays and she was deeply engrossed in the novel and cried when she finished reading it, and alas, he admitted he hadn't finished the novel before recommending it.

It's been a rather grey and wet winter, but not snowing, so I hunkered down to read it over the weekend, and I found the novel interesting in how the actual prose (I am a sucker for finding great lines in a novel, lines that I want to repeat over and over to anyone who will listen), and I hadn't found those in the novel, but the plot of the young, successful gamers interested me, though I would have liked to have spent more time with Sam's grandparents, but then, the prose took a dramatic change on the chapter titled "Marriage," about 2'/3 through the novel. I wondered why this prose, this reflection hadn't occurred sooner, but it didn't, and I don't want to give away spoilers, but when Marx's life changes dramatically, the style of the writing also changed dramatically. I finished the novel feeling much more positive about the writing, the story, and wonder if I should try playing a video game..

“What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”

This book is winning awards all over and it certainly deserves it. It has such a unique fingerprint, it is a fresh concept...genre bending while still being heavily literary. Having the '90's video game subculture as a background for this story of friendship gave it the perfect, gritty feel. Normally we only see video games used in science fiction but this was not at all in the realm of sci-fi/fantasy or even speculative fiction. This is a modern and fresh perspective while still being nostalgic.

Sadie is a young girl trying to find her way in a male dominated work space, while Sam is her BFF/partner who has his own set of turmoil including poverty, disability and grief. They both grow and change so much throughout this story (and their lives) it can be frustrating and heartbreaking but it is always consistent. I loved seeing how their life events would manifest into art and become Easter eggs in their video games (obviously, the Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was the best and most heartbreaking).

This story treads through so many concepts and social issues as Sam and Sadie navigate their careers and lives including misogyny, gun violence, LGBTQ issues, disability, childhood cancer etc.etc.etc. it is certainly heavy! Most of all I really loved seeing a platonic life-long friendship between members of the opposite sex.. i think that is important to have in life and in our stories.

All in all, as a girl who grew up in the '90's playing video games I was SO excited for it (+ the hype and the gorgeous cover art was irresistible) while I really enjoyed the read and I think it does deserve all of the awards and attention it has received (again such a unique and genre bending book!) I personally enjoyed it less than I was hoping.