Sadie Green is at the hospital and bored out of her mind. Her sister is sick and everyone around her is focused on her sister, forgetting to provide activities or even food for Sadie. A helpful nurse directs Sadie to the game room for the patients and tells her to enjoy herself. Expecting it to be empty, she’s caught off guard when she enters the room to find a boy playing a video game. That fateful meeting with Sam Maser will change the course of Sadie’s life from developing early friendships, to choosing a college major, to developing a professional career, to falling in love. Sam is there with her every step of the way, even when they are separated by miles and periods of silence in their friendship.
Set over a three-decade period, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin captures the lives of Sadie and Sam as they learn to cope with loss, difficult friendships, and building their careers. With a good bit of this book built around video games and their creation, Zevin provides technical knowledge of the games as well as a realistic look at the working environment inside a start-up game developer. The details around the personal loss of these main characters is both heartbreaking and relatable for anyone who has suffered the loss of those closest to them.
I give Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow 3 out of 5 stars. While I found the character development and backstory relatable, this novel was difficult to follow for someone who is not a gamer like me. I also found some of the supporting characters to be more of a distraction than an addition to the novel with their storylines feeling as though they were forced into the book to provide length and additional action without thought for how it would impact the overall story. I do appreciate the way Zevin moves the story between cities much like the lives of some of the most prominent game developers of the early 21st century. The business challenges faced by the developers is also very realistic and mirrors what so many entrepreneurs face when starting a new company.
I recommend this book to gamers looking for a good read. With themes of parental loss, physical disability, sexual encounters of a varying level of kink, and active shooters, I would advise this book should be read by more mature audiences at least 16 and older. This novel has some heavy and dark moments and is not a light and easy read.
I chose Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow for the prompt “Good Reads Winner in 2022” for the Booklist Queen 2023 reading challenge. I did choose the audio version of this book at the suggestion of many other non-gaming readers who said the book felt bogged down by the technical terms and game development scenes. While this book was not my favorite read of the month so far, I know many game loving readers have quite enjoyed this novel and it comes highly recommended by critics, as shown by it’s status as Goodread’s Best Fiction Book of 2022 and Book of the Month’s 2022 Book of the Year.
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