This is the first book I've ever rated 5 stars after wanting to DNF it multiple times while reading. Nothing about my enjoyment of this book makes sense. I don't play and know nothing about video games, yet somehow I'm in love with this story? Gabrielle Zevin is apparently THE author for me. There are so many things to love here, but my favorite was the exploration of platonic love and how it can be just as important as romantic relationships. I’ve never read anything like this and doubt I ever again will.

4.5 stars - This was another excellent book by Gabrielle Zevin. It is a story of friendship and love about friends who are video game designers. Sadie and Sam meet at 11 year olds and the book follow them into their thirties. Marx was my absolute favorite character in the book. It was so well written and all the characters - even lesser ones like Dov, Zoe, Simon and Ant - were interesting and well developed. I highly recommend this book. Thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC.

Sadie Green and Sam Masur meet as children in a hospital, with Sam there as a patient and Sadie there for her sister. That meeting over video games in the common area of the hospital is the beginning of a lifelong relationship between Sam and Sadie that ebbs and flows through the years. I loved all of the characters in this book, and I enjoyed learning more about the process of creating video games. They truly are labors of love. This beautiful book is filled with all kinds of love. I highly recommend it.

On the surface you may think this book is about video games, but it’s about so much more than that. It’s about friendship first and foremost, I think. It’s about love, life, learning, growing, determination, nostalgia, victory, tragedy, success, and failure. About sexism and feminism. It’s about that special bond you can develop with a colleague when you both pour your heart and soul into your work. It’s about the social climate we live in today.

The main characters in this book are deep and complex, and I think @gabriellezevin did such a wonderful job writing them, and staying true to their journey. This is a very character driven story, but it’s another one that really worked for me, and I really enjoyed.

Read this if you love:
- character driven novels
- slow burning plot lines
- Complex characters
- Storylines that play out over decades
- Tragic love

The one and only drawback for me personally, were a few parts that moved a little slow for my taste. But that’s my issue, not the book’s!

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was an absolute joy to read. This story and it’s characters are so endearing. For those of you who have had a friendship spanning a lifetime, you will relate to the ups and downs faced along the way. Sam and Sadie are the best of friends.. most of the time. When relationships, business, and bad decisions interfere, they’re friendship will be tested but they always seem to find each other. For the first half of this book I didn’t want to put it down. I loved the story of how Sam and Sadie met and was rooting for they’re journey to creating a video game. Around the halfway point I struggled to keep interest in the side stories and found some aspects to be irrelevant. By the end I still loved the book as much as I thought I would. Needless to say, I will be buying anything Gabrielle Zevin writes from now on!

Thank you Netgalley and Knopf Publishing Group for the advanced copy!

4.5/5

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is by Gabrielle Zevin. Some readers may go in thinking that this is a book akin to Ready Player One or Warcross - it’s not. While the main characters are gamers and program games, this book is more about relationships, finding oneself, and figuring out life in general. I was sucked into this book pretty quickly - whether it was the writing or the beginning storyline - it didn’t matter. I cared about these two kids and wondered how the heck this story was going to evolve. Add in Sam’s grandparents (how amazingly wonderful they are!) and some of the other characters to round out the cast - and they just complete this book. Are there flaws - yes, but there are flaws in life. Did I want to smack some sense into the two main characters - quite often, but that’s why I think I really really liked them … flaws and all. I enjoyed Ms. Zevin’s non-gaming little nods - such as art (The Strawberry Thief), literary references (Dickens, Dickinson, and Shakespeare), and cities (LA & Boston). I did find myself consulting a dictionary for a few words (though I laughed at one Latin phrase Ms. Zevin tossed in; no, I don’t know Latin but I recognized three of the words). One section had me confused for a bit - as the story moved to a different person and the reader is dropped into a gaming world for a little bit (all of this is explained and makes sense), but overall for a book that is 416 pages, it didn’t feel that long to me. Do read the Author’s Note at the end … I did like the Magic Eye discussion (my partner also never sees them!). This is a book I can see myself rereading and getting something new out of each time … exactly the type of book I enjoy.

It's hard to describe why I loved this book, but it was amazing. I loved getting to know the characters. No one was perfect - all felt incredibly real. The structure was fantastic as well. This was such a compelling read that kept me wanting to keep picking this up. Don't be intimidated by the video game aspect. While the book is about characters that create video games, the book itself is about so much more than that. This is going to be one of my top reads of the year!

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

I loved this book. I’m not a gamer, but following the story of these three friends (their friendships are so intricately drawn!) as they come of age, and seeing the role games - creating them, playing them, living between real life and imaginary worlds - makes for a great reading experience: poignant, beautiful, suspenseful & intriguing. I finished almost a week ago and this story is still with me in the best possible way. Highly recommend.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book.

A great story that revolves around the life of Sam and Sadie’s friendship throughout the years. I don't even know where to start as this covers many themes and a lot of relatable situations such as depression, disability, friendship, family, love, betrayal, abuse, grief, etc. Even if you are not familiar with or ever played video games you will still be drawn to the story and fall in love with these characters. This is definitely a different kind of book as it focuses on friendship, on real problems that we all have to confront. The author did an amazing job creating depth to these characters and you might want to slap them a few times it's all part of their growth. At around 80% into the book, I was SOBBING, I have shed a few tears for books before but this event just shook me to my core and I couldn't handle it. I adored this book so much, it was amazing, I was enthralled in the story and invested in this friendship between Sam, Sadie, and Marx. They were some slow parts but I read every word, no skimming because I wanted to know more about their lives and where would it all go. I cannot emphasize enough how great and beautiful was this book.

Devastating, revelatory, broke me wide open. What is love? It is looking for someone in the dead of night. It is sitting across from them, playing a game. It is an inside joke and the forbidden pleasure of knowing nobody else will understand. It is creating something from scratch and sharing before you’re finished.

I probably should have known how much I would love this because I was a BIG Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac girlie in middle school and a HUGE Halt and Catch Fire babe during my pandemic year. But Zevin just blew me away with everything here: the timeline, and the depth of detail about each character’s life, and the games themselves; but mostly Sam and Sadie together, always in flux, always creating. I loved the setting. I loved the Pioneers section. I just saw a review criticizing the Pioneers section, and I’m like oh, buddy, we’re different. The creativity and the emotion and the heart here is just, whew, eviscerating. It's about games, yes, but mostly it's about friendship and pain and play and intimacy and betrayal and loving each other through it all, even when the love isn't enough, even when the love is too much. My absolute favorite kind of book.

This book is truly a work of art - definitely my favorite book of the year so far and probably the best one I've read in much longer than that. The characters were so well developed that I truly cared about them all and their relationships. I laughed out loud, I cried and I highlighted passages that were wise and beautiful. This story is going to stay with me for a long time!

I received an electronic ARC from Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group through NetGalley.
Zevin has meshed gaming, nostalgia, and friendship in this novel of two long time friends who share so much then move apart and reconnect throughout their lives. During college, Sam and Sadie connect with a third person, Marx, and this trio merge their lives, loves and work. These are flawed characters who somehow manage to function and balance each other. Obvious credit to Marx for this part of the story but more subtly, readers see Sam and Sadie work for this too. Life tragedies weave through the story as it moves back and forth in time frames.
As I'm not a gamer, some of the video game creation portions felt a bit long but I appreciated learning more. Kudos to Zevin for the Shakespeare reference title. This is one I need to sit with and think about to fully see all of the meanings.

What a wonderfully brilliant and whimsical story.

Thank you SO MUCH, NetGalley and major props to the publisher for the ARC of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I would genuinely read this book every single year - and I'm definitely not a re-reader.

The characters are so well-developed from the get-go. Sam and Sadie, you are truly unforgettable characters. I'm a reader who is drawn to memorable characters v. world-building and major plot descriptions. No, thanks; gimme an interesting, dimensional character, please. I'm also a sucker for back-and-forth POVs - so this book delivered on more than one front for me.

Well-written, nostalgic in all the right ways (even if you're not an avid video gamer), and emotional. Highly recommend this.

Wow-still thinking about this one! I was hesitant about it at first, since I am not big into the video game world, so I was unsure of how technical it would be. i am glad I believed the early hype and took a chance! This is the story of Sadie and Sam, two childhood best friends who unite over a love of video games and game design. The story takes off, as the two rise together in the video game industry and the book follows their rises and falls together. That is all I can say, for fear of not doing justice to this work. The gaming world does play a part in the background noise, but for a non-gamer, it is not distracting or technical. The characterization of the characters is excellent and the emotional investment I had in them by the end of the story caught me by surprise. This book has light moments and moments of humor, balanced with deep emotions. Themes of race, grief, love, ableism, family, all weave in and out of the story. I am a big Macbeth fan and was wondering how the title from a Shakespearean tragedy would come into the play on a book about gaming. It clicks masterfully near the end of the novel. It did take me a little bit to immerse myself in the world, but once it did and the pace picked up I could not put it down. Will easily become on the best books on the year-end lists!

I’ve heard wonderful things about this book and it did not disappoint, what a fun read! I am not a video game person but I don’t think that took away from the book at all!

As much as I wanted to love this book, it just fell a little flat for me. At times, the book made me honestly feel a little stupid for not understanding something (that could just be me). I felt the plot was so so and the characters were okay, if not a bit generic. I did enjoy it enough to where I would recommend it to certain friends whom I know will probably like it.

Oh how I loved this book.

I loved Sam and Sadie and Marx. The pain and the love, the joy and the heartache. At its core this story is about love. Platonic and romantic. But it is woven through video games and designs.

I do not play video games, but this beautifully written novel makes me want to.

5 stars for sure. Fantastic.

Thank you to NetGalley for the eARC.

While I enjoyed "The Storied Life of AJ Fikry", Gabrielle Zevin's earlier work,I found that book a bit saccharine: a sentimental "tear jerker" that viewed life through rose colored glasses.

This was clearly the work of a more mature writer, who has dealt with love and loss, and
who knows on a bone deep level that life has its tragedies and that all problems cannot
be solved. Someone who has grieved the death of loved ones.

The structure of the story is built around video games, gaming, gamers, and game developers.
As a gamer myself, I could relate to this. I actually learned a lot about video games and
game developement from this book.

There are gaming motifs sprinkled throughout the book. This is done quite artfully.

Sadie Green and Sam Masur start developing games as college students in Cambridge: Sadie at MIT and Sam at Harvard. Sam's roommate, bon vivant theater student Marx Watanabe cheers them on and supports them.

Sadie is Jewish American, Sam an American of part Korean and part Jewish descent; Marx is an American with a Korean mother and a Japanese father.

Sadie meets Sam when both are children. Sadie, visiting her sister Alice who's being treated for cancer in a Los Angeles hospital, encounters Sam, recovering from a severe injury to his foot in an auto accident, and they start gaming together.

Years later, they collaborate on making video games.

They are very good at it.

Sam and Marx graduate in 1997 from Harvard. It’s unclear when Sadie finishes MIT, as she drops out for a while to create games with Sam.

The three of them--Sadie, Sam ("Mazer"), and Marx create a successful gaming company, Unfair Games, after moving to California from Boston.

Sam and Sadie never get into a romantic relationship. In fact, they alternate being best friends with extended periods of treating each other horribly, not speaking to each other for years, etc.

Even so, there's a special love between them which both of them refuse to acknowledge.

The story centers on their on-again off-again interaction.

We live in a society that is obsessed with romantic and sexual love.

But there are other kinds of love that can be more profound.

This book explores that idea.

Zevin writes in a prose style which, though it's peppered with million dollar words and gaming arcana, is relatively simple.

She uses games as metaphors for life, in particular the lives of the characters involved.

The title comes from the famous speech from Shakespeare's MacBeth (a play in which Marx plays Banquo in a college production):

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Zevin makes these kinds of tie-ins between the characters, the story, and quotes or
gaming metaphors or plays and books throughout the book.

Sadie says towards the end of the book, when she has a child and has been through some
serious losses, "I imagine people playing. Sometimes it's one of our games, but sometimes,
it's any game. The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I'm feeling despair is to imagine
people playing, to believe no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players."

I'm not sure I agree that games are the answer to all despair, although it can certainly be
therapeutic and cheering to immerse oneself in the world of a game.

Both Sadie and Sam have both been traumatized by their experiences.

Sam has been traumatized by his disability and the death of his mother, in the auto accident that caused both. This happened to him as a child, and he's never really gotten over it. He dissembles and deceives in part because he believes people will reject him because he's disabled.

Sadie is traumatized by losses later in life.

They both need to learn to get over themselves and transcend their egos and self-importance and to realize that to be alive is to experience pain and that they are not the only ones to experience grief.

Sam dissembles and hides his disability and pushes people away from him with cruelty and
secretiveness.

Sadie can be snarky, mean, volatile, and self centered.

Marx is the stable element in their world. He is the calm person who keeps things together.

By the end of the book, Sadie and Sam have grown.

A minor criticism is that these people sometimes seem a bit too snarky, self-centered, smarty pants, and full of themselves.

But, they do grow during the novel.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and found it engrossing.

Thanks to NetGalley and Alfred A. Knopf/Borzoi Books for providing an ARC (Advanced Review Copy) in exchange for an honest review.

#TomorrowandTomorrowandTomorrow #NetGalley

There is a lot of hype around this one and most, if not all, early readers are loving it. So it pains me to say that I found it to be…fine. Enjoyable and readable enough, but I didn’t feel it was exceptional as it seems is the case for other readers. I’ll preface my comments by saying that I’m not a gamer. I had a brief Atari/Nintendo phase waaayyy back, but it is decidedly not my thing. And thus, I felt that there was a touch too much focus on the finer details of video games (there is a whole chapter spent within a particular game, that I could have done without). In my view, this book would have benefitted from some heavy editing, particularly around the video game details, which would have delivered a more streamlined and digestible novel. I know I’m in the minority here and, as such, I expect an avalanche of glowing reviews on and around its publication. Thanks so much to @knopf and @netgalley for an early copy of the book.

I loved The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, so I jumped at the chance to receive an advance copy of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow! I was not disappointed. This is a unique story of friendship. Childhood friends reconnect and begin the creative process of working together to develop a game. The story examines friendship, expectations, the price of success, disappointments, and perceptions.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book! You don’t have to be familiar with gaming to appreciate this remarkable story. I highly recommend this book. It would be a great choice for book club discussion.

I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book. All opinions are my own.