4.5⭐️Video gaming…not my normal jam. Yet in this latest book by Zevin (𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘥 𝘓𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘈𝘑 𝘍𝘪𝘬𝘳𝘺), she pulled me deep into the world of game creation, world building and story telling and I seriously could not put it down. I adored the main characters, Sadie and Sam, who meet in the hospital as kids and discover a mutual love of gaming, an activity that can take one away from the sorrows, trauma, and tragedy of their real lives. And over decades of their lives, sorrow is rampant. But oh how I loved these two people, and the their musketeer, Marx, who sees these two and all their faults, and loves them unconditionally. Zevin has a remarkable gift, just like a video game creator; she is able, just through her words, to make these characters come alive, to live inside my brain, to the point that I felt bereft when I turned the final page. Do yourself a favor and entire the world Zevin has created - it is a beautiful place within an incredible new book.

“ A doorway, she thought. A portal. The possibility of a different world. The possibility that you might walk through the door and reinvent yourself as something better than you had been before.”

I’m not a gamer, and you don’t have to be to appreciate this beautiful book about a lifelong friendship that transcends romantic love. Two kids meet and weather separation and conflict to join creative forces—platonic soulmates who fall apart and lose touch over and over again without ever losing the love they have for one another. 4 and a half stars.

SPOILER ALERT: TW: mass shooting

If gun violence has impacted your life, you may want to skip this one.

A book about games, friendship, and love. It is primarily about games though. Sam and Sadie, the two main characters talk about games, play games and make games.
One thing I had a hard time with was following
along with the time lines and a serious lack of communication between Sam and Sadie. They could have resolved many a hurt if they had talked about the things they were assuming about each other. That being said, I really enjoyed this book. I enjoyed the friendships, the games from my childhood, and the love stories.
It must be stated with current times that there is a work place mass shooting.
I highly recommend this book.

I don't think this author will ever top The Storied Life of A. J. Fiery. This book, like her last one, was good, not great. Whiny, privileged people who make video games with very little plot. She is a good writer though. There's no denying that. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I am a fan of Gabrielle Zevin's previous work and while I liked this book, it wasn't a favorite. The pacing felt a little uneven and the section of the book where the characters are interacting virtually in the game did not hold my attention. . .but I am not a gamer! The characters were nonetheless compelling and I enjoyed the story arc.

Thanks to Knopf and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this title prior to publication. I was really looking forward to this one, as I adored AJ Fikry. I saw it hyped in multiple places. And I did like it, but I did not fall in love with it like I expected to. I did like the 80s and video game nostalgia, and I liked how close we got to Sam and Sadie throughout this book. I really liked, towards the end, where we were reading the POV of the video game characters. I did not like the pacing of this book - some chapters were very long and some very short, and I did not like the way Zevin chose to reveal backstory. I like non-linear timelines, but I felt like I was being jerked around through this one and could not get my footing at times. I will definitely recommend this to friends who LOVE video games, as I think it will be right for some people.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow… is kind of what it felt like when I thought about getting through this book. At points, it’s compelling with deep, complex, and astute observations, and it was nice to watch the characters develop across several decades through the various formats of prose employed. However, the plot moves slowly and I found it difficult to connect to and like the main characters. For some, Sam and Sadie will resonate, but that was not the case for me.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for this review!

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is the story of Sam Mazur and his long friendship with Sadie Green, beginning when they were children and Sadie would visit Sam in the hospital in Los Angeles, continuing on through their meeting up again in Boston (where she was attending MIT and he was at Harvard), and their friendship with Sam's roommate Marx and the three of them creating a successful video game company, the fictional Unfair Games. It was such an amazing story that spans years of their friendship and working together.

So why 4 stars rather than 5? What frustrated me about this story was the pretentious language. Why use a five-syllable word when the more common word will do? I'm a college graduate with a healthy vocabulary and yet I found myself - at least once every few chapters - having to look up the meaning of what I believe is an obscure word that was used rather than the common word. Does this add to the story? Not IMHO. The last word I had to look up was "tautology" - why not just use "repetition" instead? Was this to show that the characters themselves were pretentiouss? Perhaps. But as a reader, I found it frustrating.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Sam and Sadie form a friendship that begins when they are children at the hospital and follows them 30 years through this thing called life — always drawn together over the bond they share for the love of games. Their relationship is at the center of the book as it waxes and wanes and becomes more complex as the years pass.

I loved the character development — Sadie and Sam, deep individuals with complex flaws, who struggled in their loneliness, stubbornness, greed, self-centeredness, and poor timing — qualities so common in all of us. Of all the characters, I especially loved Marx in all his simplicity, loyalty, and innocent goodness. We need more Marx’s in the world.

Despite the characters, I am in the minority of folks, I enjoyed this book in an average way. Where the book lost me: the more obscure game mentions, and I personally, felt a bogged down in the game development technicalities. I found multiple parts of the book to drag for me but luckily was invested in the characters and the plot moved things along enough for me to finish. Some of the Shakespeare references were too highbrow for me and the whole Pioneer game, while I understand it’s purpose, felt like it went on unnecessarily long.

Read this book if you enjoy, both well developed and flawed characters with an imperfect but entwined friendship. Read this book if you are an avid gamer or are a Xennial!

Thank you to @netgalley and @knopfdoubleday for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is a unique coming of age novel about 3 friends that are gamers who grow up together and how their lives and careers intertwine. Thank you to Netgalley for the e-ARK!

The book is broken into ten sections and uses different narrators. It moves through time starting at the beginning when Sam and Sadie meet as 11 year olds in a hospital and become best friends. They have a falling out and do not reconnect until in college, where Sam's best friend, Marx, is added to the friendship. They create a wildly successful game and form a company that launches many successful games and the three into gamer success and fortune.

I loved the characters. They were well developed and richly layered. There are a lot of asian cultures and jewish culture in the mix of these 3 which really added a human element. But what I really liked was how the reader watched these 3 grow up relationally within their group and with others that they interacted with. They made mistakes, had fights and took lovers. They grew up before the reader and experienced the ebbs and flows of life. All of this built upon the initial foundation where we found the 3. I am also glad that there was no love triangle here as that was not the point of the novel.

The only aspect that I did not like was that the book was too long. I felt the story could have successfully cut several parts and been better for it.

An overall, strong, great read!

DNF @ 23%

I want to preface this by saying that I love video games, and find their development to be very interesting. With that being said, this book was not for me. It was very slow paced and did not keep my attention. I don’t know what the point of the story was and do not care enough to continue reading. There are constant time-jumps that did not make sense to me or seem to contribute to the character development of Sam or Sadie in anyway. Lastly, teacher-student relationships, especially when one of them is married, is NOT something that I enjoy reading about at all.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Sam Masur and Sadie Green met as children when they both lived in California forming an immediate and enduring bond over computer/video games. Sam was a patient at the same hospital, having had multiple surgeries on an injury, where Sadie’s older sister was being treated. All was going well between them until Sam discovered something Sadie had done so he broke the friendship. Now, several years later in his junior year at Harvard, Sam reconnects with Sadie in a Massachusetts train station. She is a student at MIT during a time in the 90’s when it was rare for women to be not only gamers, but designers of such.

After Sam and Sadie reconnect when he helps her through a serious depression brought on from some poor life choices that she made with her mentor, Dov, at MIT who is essentially a predator jerk, they begin to design a new game called Ichigo, both of them living and breathing it to the extent they each take a semester off from school. Sam’s wealthy roommate, Marx, a charismatic and caring young man, is the third member of their tight group. His support including lending his apartment and making sure the two geniuses remember eat, bath, and sleep forms the basis of their eventual company where at young age, they have astounding success. At time it seems Sam and Sadie are two halves of a whole; however, other times they are rivals at odds which is perhaps part of their gaming natures. Marx plays an integral part not only in their business but the personal lives of Sam and Sadie as well.

When a book’s title comes from one of Shakespeare’s best know tragedies, Macbeth, whose speech in Act 5. Scene 5 could be the banner for nihilism, readers should expect a lot of heart wrenching tragedy, dark nights of the soul, and an emotional roller coaster. Especially for those of us who are not gamers, it is also handy to be able to look up words on Kindle pertaining to that culture as well as erudite words that are not in most folk’s everyday parlance. This story is cleverly written in some aspects and poses such issues as complicated relationships, work being all, women’s challenges in a male dominated industry, and a lot existential guilt, angst, and most of all, how games work on our psyches for good or bad. It certainly begs the question whether obsessively playing computer games help or hinder our abilities to deal with real life. For this reader, the melodrama and dark tone is a bit too much following the style of much literary fiction in that I found more sadness than joy, heartbreak than hope, and too many mind bender rabbit trails that cause the story to drag in places.

DNF -- I was 30% in and enjoying it fine; not sure where it was headed but, as I said, I was 30% in.

Then I came to a part on "S&M" ... "handcuffs" ... "complicated props" .. "gagging her on occasion" ... "he liked to slap her and spank her and pull her hair" ... etc. etc. This by a teacher to a student. Ugh. No thanks; sorry the book had to go there.

This is a beautiful, sweeping novel that follows two friends from adolescence into mid life. They go in and out if friendship, through college, becoming business partners, and more. A truly beautiful book that shows the nuances of friendship and life in general.

Wow, I just have to say that I was fully captivated by this novel! I wasn't sure what to expect to be quite honest. It is a little bit of a different writing style that I'm used to but oh what a storyteller Gabrielle Zevin turned out to be!. The story is told over span almost 30 years. I really could not put it down. It's quite emotional and heartbreaking at times and perhaps a little painful. While the ending is a touch bittersweet or undetermined, I feel it was the perfect ending to this story.

ARC kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was a great book for throwback gamers and people who love coming of age stories. It’s the story of Sadie and Sam, who met in the hospital when they were 12. We follow them through a couple decades as they lose and find one another, create games and a company, and discover themselves.

I enjoyed the shout outs to games of the 80s and 90s as well as the details of game creation. For those reasons alone I have recommended this book to a lot of people. And then the friendships and relationships between the characters was so refreshing and complicated.

What can I say, this was so good - bittersweet, funny at times. All of that and a whole lot of heart. This was a winner for me.

My thanks to Knopf Doubleday and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

The story spans from coast to coast and shows that business success isn’t everything. This author knows people so well.

A wonderful book about a two brilliant gamers who are lifelong best frenemies, never quite lovers, and the amazing games they create. It almost made me want to play games myself (but not quite). I would give this to people who loved the gamer part of "Overstory," "Ready Player One" and "Little Brother." I bet this wins an Alex Award (for adult books that teens will like). I read it in advance through NetGalleys and was grateful to do so. I love Gabrielle Zevin.

This author is amazing. I have loved every book I have ever read and this one did not disappoint. I loved it so much. Needs to be on every shelf.

I loved this book about an intense platonic friendship between two game creators., as they experience life’s triumphs and tragedies. I loved all the characters and Zevin writes compellingly in a setting I might not ordinarily find interesting. This book is highly recommended.