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 is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that 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. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.
Comment: I had not planned on reading this novel but I saw it available at the library and decided to take a chance on it. I saw many readers liked and it even won a GoodReads category from 2022 and that was enough to convince me.
In this book we follow the years as Sam and Sadie, who become friends after meeting in a hospital but then lost contact, reconnect one day out of the blue and that leads them to create video games together. Their work is a success but their personal lives aren't always as easy or pain free as they might have liked. Their love for gaming unites them, though, and allows them to accomplish a lot but will they truly be able to see the positive things only or the same issues that separated as children will come back and this time with adult emotions to make it all even more complicated?
In fact, if not the library I must confess I was not that eager to read this book. Not only would it feature a lot of video game talk, which I can easily pass, but I had read another book by the author which I liked but that had certain plot choices at the end I wasn't fond of and feared the same might happen here. In a way, my assumption proved right, for there's a certain level of drama at some point which didn't have to exist... I can only suppose it was a tactic to enhance how limited our lives are but it felt unnecessary to me.
The story is quite simple: two children, Sam and Sadie, become friends but Sam discovers Sadie was only spending time with him because it would look good for her family. We obviously know Sadie didn't see it as being so bad as that and she is even advised by her grandmother about the morals of it, but they just stop seeing each other anyway. Now they are adults, their feelings and maturity allow them to see things differently and they reconnect. This friendship and the shared love for video games does the rest.
It does seem as if this is a simple premise but of course the best part is the richness of the text and the incredible amount of detail and nuances the author included, especially in terms of cultural references. It does seem likely the has planned and researched a lot, even if she liked video games herself, which could have been a great start for all the information used. Unfortunately, for me some of the whole gaming content wasn't that appealing because I don't play video games and it isn't something I'm very interested in knowing more about.
Still, I recognize the complexity of the content and the fact the author tried to give the information correctly, which wasn't as easy as that, I can imagine. However, for me, the interest was more on the characters and their relationships and in this regard, I was a little disappointed. Sam is a likable guy, he went through something terrible as a child, had some experiences which weren't easy such as the accident which put him in the hospital and that caused him so much pain and the problem in one of his foot. I understand that this and that life in general affect anyone, but his personality remained flat for the duration of the book and I couldn't have a good idea about him except for the basic.
As for Sadie... I will say that while she did seem more complex than Sam, I wasn't very fond of some of her choices. Recalling the information above on how her grandmother trued to explain a certain moral concept, well Sadie is a very clever girl, then woman but she still didn't do the best choices, emotional and morally in certain situations. I can rationally accept the reality people make mistakes, people don't see things as easily in real life and while the author might have given realism to Sadie's character, I still disliked immensely how she behaved towards those around her when she enters a relationship with someone she shouldn't! And she knew it, she was not mislead. I think there had to be a reason for this, but for the life of me, I couldn't care less about the idea of karma or fairness or whatever was intended.
Apart from the video game talk, we also have other type of content such as the references to the characters' personal lives and past experiences, some things were interesting... then the secondary characters were more or less intriguing, some more than others as is usual, but I also got the feeling some things were only mentioned for drama purposes, rather than it being organic to the story. I've ended up thinking this book, at its base, was pretty much like the other I had read by the author: central characters with mundane lives but with key elements to make them "special" and then a huge drama before the end being a little unsatisfying.
