I don't think I'll ever find another author who so beautifully writes books that speak to my heart and lived experience so truly.

My first 5 star read of the year! Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow may be about gaming/game development on the surface, but it is so much more. I immediately connected with the characters and felt that I cared about them. Thank you to Knopf Doubleday and NetGalley for the ARC.

If you are looking for a book that pulls you in from the very first page and has a hold of your heart until the last, this book is for you. I instantly fell in love with every character, and Zevin creates characters like no other author I've read. They're so real and flawed and unique that you can't help but root for them. The computer and gaming setting is something new to me, but I loved how she tied the games and their lives together, but not always so obvious. This is a great read, but I did give 4 stars because the last 100 pages just didn't flow like the first 300. Definitely recommend to anyone looking for an emotional and interesting read.

Absolutely loved this book! Loved that it introduced me to gaming topics that I knew little about and loved the characters from start to finish. I want to start reading everything and anything this author has written. It was that good. Sam, Sadie, and Marx are people I would want to meet- I felt like I got to know them deeply and felt that I understood them, their decisions, and their interactions with one another. This is what it means to get wrapped up in a book!
If I could give more than 5 stars I would.
Thank you NetGalley for a ARC.

I’m going to be in a minority on this one. The book was just okay for me. I love the story of friendship, passion, work, love. But the story got bogged down in the technical aspects. I do also love, though, that the author kept me, as a reader, on my toes by changing up the main narrator and narrative device in the chapters. There was one standout chapter, though, and if you’ve read it you know the one. It was just breathtaking and heart wrenching. It’s the one told in a dream-like state. IYKYK. But no spoilers. I also enjoyed a chapter being told in the format of characters in a game. But, also, I was thrown off a lot by some of the wording choices, almost like an over reliance on the Microsoft Word thesaurus. It didn’t lend the narrative to a natural cadence, for me. But, still a compelling and, over all, enjoyable story.

This is an elegant, compelling and heartfelt novel about the early days of video game design, and three people, Sam, Sadie and Marx who collaborate to become legendary in their field. It's a glorious book and quite and adventure to read.

Many thanks to all involved in providing me with this copy.

So many thoughts; where to begin! I loved Sam, Sadie, Marx and crew. I don’t think you need knowledge of video games to fully enjoy this. Ultimately, it is a story of relationships and love. I felt like the middle dragged a bit and perhaps 50 pages could have been cut, but otherwise it was beautiful. The writing was incredible. The ending will leave me thinking for a while. Highly recommend.

My favorite book of 2022!! Gabrielle Zevin will always be an auto-read author for me but, after reading this one, she just amazes me even more. I cannot describe how powerful this story is and I have recommended it to everyone I know - don't miss it!

Lured in by the beautiful cover, reference to a Macbeth quote, and my prior experience reading this author's books, I struggled at times with the pacing and thought the story fell a bit flat. The story was not compelling, although the writing was beautiful.

So I"m going out on a limb here and am going against the vast majority of reviews that say this is only about video games and you must love video games to like this book. This book is actually about friends, chosen family, and the struggles when work and friends are the same. If this book had been about, say firefighters and the close family that forms within a station, we wouldn't rant about how you really have to love firetrucks to enjoy this book. That's preposterous. But video games are polarizing.

Loved the book, loved spending my time with the characters, and sad to have it end.

I’ve heard and read so many conflicting things about this book over the past few months. I honestly didn’t know what to expect. Now, as I try to gather my thoughts for this review, I finally understand why there have been so many differing opinions. On the one hand, I agree wholeheartedly with every reader who was annoyed by the numerous hot political topics that fueled this story. They’re all in there - gender identity, homosexuality, abortion, gun violence, racism - just to name a few. Also, the author’s needless use of big words was pretty irritating. (I personally don’t like having to keep a dictionary or thesaurus by my side while reading.) If you’re not a fan of the gaming industry then this isn’t the book for you because gaming IS the main focus of the whole story. My two grown sons have been gamers their whole lives, so I’m used to it, and this didn’t bother me. However, the two main characters, Sam and Sadie, have a very toxic friendship, and they seriously got on my last nerve. (I’ve never seen two “friends” hold so many grudges!) So, you might be wondering, why did I give this book four stars? Well…because once I started reading it I couldn’t put it down. Because the author’s writing style is flawless. Because even with the aggravating parts - political topics included - she somehow kept me turning page after page, and I was totally enraptured. Would I recommend it to someone? Probably not without a warning. Am I sorry I read it? Not in the least.

This was an interesting story and one that I was not expecting. This is is also a book you have to pay attention too because the writing styles will change on you if you don’t and you will get confused. 😂

In 2007, when I wrote a book about gaming in libraries, Will Wright was exploring how games could make people feel emotions (like guilt), and the US was slow in recognizing video games as an art form while the UK had already established an award category for video games at BAFTA, while I was arguing they were valid ways of telling a story that involved the player in the creation of that story. Zevin pesents a world where creators set out to make works of art, even based on the style of a famous work of art, in this brilliant, intricately plotted novel about friendship and gaming.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows the trajectory of two friends who love one another but never get together. Their partnership at Unfair Games, their video game company, is more important At twelve, Korean-American Sam is recovering from a car accident in the hospital while eleven-year old’s Sadie’s sister Alice is getting cancer treatment. They form a friendship playing Super Mario Bros. and the staff begs Sadie to come back and visit–Sam, coming to terms with his mother’s death and a crippling injury hadn’t spoken until she showed up. She makes him her bat mitzvah volunteer project and wins a community service award from Hadassah. When he finds out, they don’t talk for six years, until he spies her in a subway station–she’s attending MIT and he is at Harvard. Hollering “you have died of dysentery!” gets her attention, and they resume their friendship and eventually talking about designing a game together. His friend and roommate Marx bankrolls an apartment and they name Marx their producer; he takes care of many details for their company, their friendship, their lives. The narrative follows their intertwining paths through the games they design together.

With characters that attend Ivy league schools, the vocabulary is smart and lush: nihilistic, verisimilitude, deictic, obfuscation, jejune, azure, simulacrum, portmanteau, fecund, echt, tautology. The allusions reference The Phantom Tollbooth, Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, the Illiad… and indirectly, Grand Theft Childhood. The timeline spans nearly twenty years and is set squarely in Generation X, with many familiar touchstones: Tamagotchis, Magic Eye, texting, same-sex marriage, MMORPGs, groundbreaking video game titles, September 11th.

The writing is spectacular and frequently, beautifully profound as the characters reflect on their abilities and disabilities; their identities and ethnicities; love and loss; mazes, puzzles, and maps; immortality and do-overs; art and sex and death and play. The narrative moves back and forth in time and yet never gets lost. So many details come back full circle, like when you die in a game and go back to the save point. Throughout the novel, the narrator breaks the fourth wall, such as when the reader is invited to consider an interview with game designer Sam Mazer in Kotaku. This also allows us to review events through a more modern lens of systemic racism, appropriation, and sexism. Another section goes meta like a game and changes the perspective to second person, playing on interactive text adventures. Another is in third person, narrating the lives of the avatars the characters create. Full disclosure: this book made me weep.

Sometimes the writing reminded me of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, with its detail on coding and debugging akin to the drudgery of magic drills at Brakebills Academy and flawed dynamic characters who stick together no matter what. Sometimes it called to mind Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat, with it’s LA setting and evocative lists of things and strong sensory detail. And as a gamer about to turn 48, who cut her teeth on the Oregon Trail on a classroom’s Apple IIe and Donkey Kong on a cocktail arcade table at the local Papa Gino’s, I kept seeing this as a love letter to gaming that recognizes video games for the art they are.

I checked this out through OverDrive at my local public library and logged onto bookshop.org to order a copy and it’s currently out of print and backordered! I blame Harry and his 2 million copy first print run.

Everyone said I would love this… I almost DNFed at like 30%. Ultimately I am glad I finished because there were good parts but overall I was underwhelmed.

I had heard mixed reviews about this book so decided to go in open minded. It seems people either love it or dislike it.
Having read the story I, on the whole, liked it. Although I do not consider myself a gamer I did spend a portion of my youth playing Sonic, Mario and Streetfighter so I went into this book feeling like I might have a little bit of knowledge on my side. This did not really seem to make a difference to the reading of the book though. There are a few technical parts that were above my head but I just kept on going. Although this book is set in the gaming world it is primarily about friendship. The ups and downs a friendship takes over the years. Small omissions that can end up being misunderstandings and the burden of lost opportunities. I enjoyed all of these aspects of the book and really became absorbed in Sam and Sadie’s friendship. This, for me, carried the whole book.
The only part I wasn’t so keen on was the chapter which was based inside a video game. I kept flicking forwards through the pages to see how long this chapter would last and hoping it would be over soon!
Overall, I give this book 3 and a half stars which I have rounded up to 4. It’s definitely worth a read even for the non gamer ( except the video game chapter!).

I loved this book. As someone who played Oregon Trail in middle school and is a female in tech (though not video games, sadly) I really loved Sadie's point of view, even when I didn't love Sadie so much. I loved the unusual formats for some of the chapters, and the vivid descriptions of the worlds that they built.

This book was so good! I am not surprised that it was chosen as book of the year in many places. Thank you for allowing me to read an advanced readers copy.

Wow - Zevin does it again. I loved this book. As a child gamer, there were so many little bits that made me feel nostalgic, but you do NOT have to have been a gamer to enjoy this. Ultimately, this is not a book about games - it’s a book about humanity and relationships and life with gaming being the storytelling device. If you have gamed, you’ll appreciate bits of that device, if you haven’t - you’ll read a beautifully written book about being human and what it means to love. Either way, it’s a win.

This book made me laugh and cry. It’s gut wrenching and BEAUTIFULLY written. It was smart and intricately plotted. I literally can’t find fault with it. Just read it.

I enjoyed this book however found some parts to be dragging. The character development was fantastic and I thought that the complexities of human relationships in all of their forms was expertly done!

I’ve heard so many great things about this book, and was intrigued to find out for myself if it lived up to the hype. This was at times slow, and long winded and I found a lot of the gaming talk went over my head a little at no fault but my own. I often found myself struggling to get through it in places, but it did pick back up again after a while. However, despite this i did enjoy the book and think it was worth the occasional difficulties. I loved the characters, and fully understand how so many people can connect to them. There is no denying that this is an incredibly well written book, with great character development. It is an incredibly well thought out and moving depiction of friendship.