Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022)-Gabrielle Zevin
This book is fun, and frustrating, and heartbreaking
Content Warnings: Car accident, injury, death, gun violence, relational abuse, suicide, racism, homophobia
Rep: Jewish, Korean, Asian, queer, Japanese, mlm, disability
Fav Quote: “Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.”
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a contemporary realistic fiction novel following two young kids into adulthood throughout their friendship, partnership, and conflicts. It gives insight into the creative process of game designing and what goes into producing a successful—and unsuccessful—video game. It also follows highly complex and flawed characters through lives of love and turmoil.
Having met in a hospital game as children, Sadie and Sam are reunited as college students. This reunion launches both their friendship and their partnership when they agree to make a videogame together. As their partnership and ambitions grow, more people are brought into their inner circle of loved ones as well as business partners. The video game industry, however, often create rifts between the game designers who are ultimately so painfully human.
Sadie and Sam are each granted the privilege of attending MIT and Harvard respectively, but each comes from very different backgrounds. Sadie was raised in Los Angeles in a wealthy family. She found herself at the hospital on the day she met Sam because her sister was being treated for cancer. Meanwhile, Sam had moved from New York at a young age after a traumatizing event spurred his mom to return to her own hometown of Los Angeles. Not long after moving, Sam lost his mom in a car crash that also crushed his foot, landing him in frequent stays at the hospital and constant pain into his young adulthood.
Both characters are highly ambitious and at times selfish, but a constant is the love they have for each other—even throughout many fights—and the love they have for video games. Their brains are seemingly hardwired for video games. Their perfectionism lent hours and hours of entertainment trying to achieve the perfect playthrough of levels and all throughout the book, they process events in their lives in relation to gaming. They understand through their experiences with death, that death means something very different in video games, and while they may be able to come close to the perfect videogame level, life gives only one attempt, and you don’t always get it right.