I have held off on reviewing this even though I read it a while ago. I know that a lot of people really liked this book; hence, the slew of five star reviews. But, for me, it just fell flat. I may have had impossible expectations given the subject matter and the reviews (and opinions of readers I respect) but I found the characters one dimensional and much of the writing and story a but tedious. Given my reaction to this, I might make an effort to read it again in the future and see if it just caught me at the wrong time.

Huge thanks to Alfred Knopf and Netgalley for this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

**I'm going to start off by saying to make sure to check the trigger warnings for this book. There are many difficult topics written in this book and if you are not prepared then you might want to wait to pick this up.**

This book visceral, raw, emotional and a love letter to the gaming world. Here we follow a group of friends turned colleagues who navigate their careers while navigating the complicated relationship with each other. All the characters are 4D and will have you rooting and sometimes not rooting for throughout this story. The plot is solid, however, this book is heavily character driven. This is my preferred writing style anyway. I was going through a rough time in my life and this book gave me a lot of comfort and escape so I have a special place for this one. I really hated this ending but I think the author was true to the characters and the book when the ending was written.

Overall, five stars. I don't think I'll read it again but if you like gaming then this is for you.

This is a fantastic book that follows the love of friendship and the challenges of life. I will and have been recommending this to anyone who wants a heart wrenching and captive read.

This book - all the feels. Sadie and Sam grow up in the 80s and 90s. Friendship brought by tragedy - rejoining as college students in the 90s. Oh nostalgia.
I enjoyed the story of the video games they build together. Massive life reflections. Ups and downs of life.
Worth all the accolades.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and Net Galley for an ARC of this book in exchange of an honest review.
I enjoyed Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I liked that it was a book about friendship and coming of age, and of course making a video game.

Loved loved loved this book. The characters, the writing, everything. I'm upset it took me so long to read it. It is definitely worth the hype. It was my first book by the author and will not be my last.

One of my new favourites that I devoured in a day and a half... the book wasn't what I expected it to be and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

I loved this book and the characters. I would recommend this book. Love the nostalgia and the authors writing.

Absolutely beautiful novel. I have nothing to say. I fell in love with these characters and they crushed my heart (no spoilers). Just a gorgeous, gorgeous book. I loved it so much and am mad I took so long to read and review it!

I cannot believe a book about video games captivated me like it did. I loved watching Sam and Sadie grow up and their relationship evolve. I was completely shocked and gutwrenched by one of the twists. What a unique, beautiful story that deserves all the praise. I have recommended it to many people already!

A unique read that I liked but didn’t love. The storyline was interesting and different from anything I’ve read before but I found the main characters to be a bit insufferable.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. I went in with it way overhyped and expecting to love it as much as my friends and fellow readers. At first, I was immediately sucked in by the story and could understand the hype. However, as it neared the end I just felt it losing steam. I think there were a lot of great takeaways especially surrounding relationships, but this just didn't resonate with me the way I was expecting. I think the story itself was really unique and interesting, but the ending just didnt match the energy of the rest of the book in my opinion. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book was the Book of the Year with several esteemed places? Pffff! Do the publishers pay for this? I realize that this is an unpopular opinion, but I often do not like the books that everyone else "likes." Perhaps I'm one of the few honest ones who don't just follow along like sheep?

This book literally had one thing to connect with and that disappeared about 3/4 of the way through. I won't specify what it is because it would "spoil" what literal actual story there is. The main characters are almost all completely unlikeable. The plot was just dumb and not something that I could connect with. Videogames? Really? The back and forth nature of some of the details was as repetitive and boring as an old game of Pong. See what I did there?

Don't be a sheep ... this one is not that interesting!

This review was also posted on Goodreads.

Wow! I absolutely loved this book! It was unlike anything I had ever read before. Sadie and Sam meet under unforeseen circumstances while kids in LA before reconvening years later in Cambridge while they're attending MIT and Harvard. A true story of friendship and the different types of love we have in our life, this was beautifully written and so different from anything else I had ever read. A definite recommendation to all.

Beautiful and sometimes heart wrenching telling of the life long journey of three friends making their way in the world of game making.

This was hands-down one of my favorite books of the year. The way Zevin captures the full spectrum of these character arcs and weaves them together so seamlessly over several decades is pretty remarkable. And I was following along without a hitch the whole time. I loved and so appreciated the author’s ability to candidly include topics like disability, the push-and-pull of our responsibilities to ourselves, our families, our friends, our careers, and, for these protagonist, to their fans, and the joys and challenges of human existence. Even though this is probably technically a coming-of-age story, it felt like so much more than that. Gabrielle Zevin is brilliant and so is this novel!

Thank you immensely to NetGalley and the publisher for this e-arc!

Never in a million years did I think I would enjoy this book as much as I did. Yes, this is a book centered around video games. But it's so much more... it's such a unique book about friendship, success, failure, relationships, loss, grief, etc. The character development was exquisite.

In 1986, Sadie Green, 11, visits a children’s hospital where her sister is being treated for cancer. There, she befriends another patient, a 12-year-old Korean Jewish boy named Sam Masur, who has a badly injured foot, and the two bond over their love for video games. Over 600 hospital visits later, they have a fight and don’t speak again for six years when they reconnect while attending college in Boston. The pair, with help from their friend Marx, form a company designing video games. Before even graduating, they have created their first blockbuster video game, Ichigo.

Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow explores identity, disability, failure, and connection over the course of three decades and various locations..

Despite receiving accolades such as the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction (2022) and the Book of the Month Book of the Year Award (2022), this novel did not resonate with me personally. Initially, I found the book's exploration of video games intriguing, but the excessive references to gaming became overwhelming.

The early chapters, focusing on Sadie and Sam’s childhood, were captivating, but my interest waned as the story progressed. While the writing and character development were commendable, the complex nature of Sadie and Sam’s friendship made it difficult for me to sympathize with or like them. In fact, all three main characters were toxic in their own ways.

Ultimately, the plot became too overwhelming for my taste. Incorporating significant amounts of trauma in the narrative left me feeling disheartened. The prevalence of LGBT characters and the extensive social commentary felt excessive and “woke” to me. I would rate this book three out of five stars.

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

There is a lot about this book that positively floored me… in particular, how ‘smart’ this novel was metaphorically. Games – the gaming world – as allegory about living life, changing course, making different choices, was a brilliant literary technique. The notion of lives lived during video games … the escapism and ability to “get it right” by replaying a game, the notion of human infallibility and re-starting a life for a second chance… SO good. The book was really deep if you wanted to mine that metaphorical and allegorical messaging.

As well, the story about friendship and the different forms of love was, indeed, powerful. I enjoyed all of that very much as I part-read and part-listened to this book.

But for me, a serious non-liker of video games (they never interested me when I was growing up during nearly the same period as these characters), the game-speak was too much, despite the wonderful way the author wove characters into the mix.

What did (and does) interest me is the way the games have evolved from the ancient Intellivision and Atari games of my youth … that today’s games have actual stories, and characters with backstories and plots. And complexity. Who knows? Maybe I’d enjoy gaming more now than I did as a kid?

Beyond that, I’m not sure I entirely gel with this author’s writing style. I was among a very few who had similar sentiments with AJ Fikry. The style in this book seems less simple than her debut, but I struggled with the dialogue – so many “Yes,” responses over and over. There were also many, many “which is to say” qualifiers and “for his/her part.”

That said, there were some beautiful, astute lines in the book that I loved, particularly about perceptions of art, artists, creativity and who gets to create what:

Art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.

OR

It was 1996, and the word “appropriation” never occurred to either of them. They were drawn to these references because they loved them, and they found them inspiring. They weren’t trying to steal from another culture, though that is probably what they did.

Consider Mazer in a 2017 interview with KOTAKU, celebrating the twentieth-anniversary Nintendo Switch port of the original ICHIGO:

Kotaku: It is said that the original ICHIGO is one of the most graphically beautiful low-budget games made, but its critics also accuse it of appropriation. How do you respond to that?

Mazer: I do not respond to that.

Kotaku: Okay… but would you make the same game if you were making it now?

Mazer: No, because I am a different person than I was then.

Kotaku: In terms of its Japanese references, I mean. Ichigo looks like a character Yoshitomo Nar could have painted. The world design looks like Hokusai, except for the Undead level, which looks like Murakami. The soundtrack sounds like Toshiro Mayuzumi…

Mazer: I won’t apologize for the game Sadie and I made. [Long pause.] We had many references – Dickens, Shakespeare, Homer, the Bible, Philip Glass, Chuck Close, Escher. [Another long pause]. And what is the alternative to appropriation?

Kotaku: I don’t know.

Mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures.

Kotaku: That’s an oversimplification of the issue.

Mazer: The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people, with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that that world, don’t you? I’m terrified of that world, and I don’t want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don’t exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Koreatown, Los Angeles. And as a mixed-race person will tell you – to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing. And, by the way, I don’t own or have a particularly rich understanding of the references of Jewishness or Koreanness because I happen to be those things. But if Ichigo had been fucking Korean, it wouldn’t be a problem for you I guess .

While I wholly appreciated this diatribe, it felt that, often, the book’s time period didn’t quite fit the current social issues the author was deliberately focused on. The above, for instance… wasn’t the term cultural appropriation only really accepted into popular vernacular in 2019/2020? Similarly, I found it a bit implausible that characters in the 1980s or even the early-to-mid 90s would be so fixated on the “them” pronouns, a relatively new way to reference pronouns/gender. I went to college during that period – though, admittedly, not to an Ivy. Maybe Sadie, Sam and Marx were ahead of my peers regarding transgender knowledge. And, one last quibble: there was absolutely no 911 service in 1984, when the author has Sam’s mother calling about the woman on the sidewalk.

So, you can see that I really liked and then also questioned some things in this book, “which is to say” (see what I did there?) I had mixed feelings overall. (Another love was the double entendre with the Pioneer video game in which "Emily" is "living on the edges of Friendship." Excellent!)

Yes, overall, I’m very happy that I experienced this book, but think – had I read it only (vs. also listening), I might not have finished. The audio gave me an appreciation of the deep love story within.

This book is a perfect love letter to humanity, to creativity, and to the 90s. Even when I hated the choices the characters were making, I loved each of them. The storytelling was extremely well done. This is one of my new favorite books of all time!