Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow Review

“Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin

Zevin wrote a beautiful book here. It has excellently deep and realistic characters with great prose. To give a very simple idea of the novel. It’s about a boy named Sam and his childhood friend Sadie falling out of friendship at a young age to then find themselves years later in college becoming friends again so they could make a video game. As you can imagine there’s more to it but I think this covers the general idea very well.

The book involves video games and talks about video games but you really don’t have to be a gamer to read this book and enjoy it. It is very much characters first and you will fall in love with the characters. Even in and out of love with the characters throughout the read. Zevin really did an amazing job of writing “people”. Genuine people who seem very real and are far from perfect.  You don’t love everyone in your life the same way at all times. You also don’t hate people the same way. Throughout reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow I would constantly like a character that I then hate and then maybe tolerate and then hate again to finally like them again. This is an extremely difficult thing to do as a writer and it’s something you get only from genuinely real characters.

I said earlier that games come up in the book but you don’t have to be a gamer to read it and enjoy it. I also think being a gamer for sure improves the experience a good bit. The characters will reference certain games, characters in games, and even genres and styles of games. Being in on it naturally makes for a feeling of being in the room with the characters. There might be a part where a character would say something like “I played that game and it was amazing. It made me wish I made it.”  You don’t need to know or have played the game to understand this character’s feelings but if you do know or have played the game they are talking about you really understand why they said that. The meaning becomes deeper with how clever the game is.

I will say I liked the first 70% of the book more than the last 30%. It just kind of lands rather than takes off at the end and I felt certain characters and plot threads were somewhat left dangling. Was this to set up a sequel?…I don’t think so. Is there room for a sequel? Maybe, but I think the things that were left unanswered were necessary to have answered. What some characters from halfway through the book are doing now might not need an answer even though I would have liked some more information.

Overall I really enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone. I recommend it even more if you’re a gamer.

4/5

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