I like how this book centers around the video game industry and how two young friends set out to create a game from scratch. It’s also a story about figuring out life on your own, and in a way it’s a come of age book as well. As we navigate through the lives of Sam and Sadie, we learn more about their aspirations and how their life decisions and struggles ended up reflected in the games they play and make. It’s a well crafted story loosely inspired by real life games (but purely fictional at the end of the day). I wish I could play Ichigo as well.

Fantastic, character-driven. I’ve already sold many copies. The main characters are an interesting arrangement of strength and weakness. This was an interesting foray into a world I took for granted — game creation.

One of the best releases of 2022! I will forever cherish Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and wish I could read it for the first time again. Thank you for such an amazing story.

An interesting look into the world of video games. I loved that the real love story in this book seemed to the love of creative, all-consuming work. Being in flow and creating art. As an artist and an entrepreneur, that really resonated with me.

I’ve read over 100 books in the past two years. None of them have actually made me cry until this one.

‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’ follows Sam and Sadie whose love for video games bonds them from the moment they meet in the hospital to over 30 years later.

𝒁𝒘𝒆𝒊𝒔𝒂𝒎𝒌𝒆𝒊𝒕 is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.

Sam and Sadie were loners who were able to find each other through unfortunate circumstances. It is not easy to find people you truly connect with in life. The relationships that are often difficult to find can also be the most worthwhile to keep.

For a 400 pager, this felt long but in a good way. I felt connected to Sam, Sadie, and Marx and the character development between them all was moving to see. So if you love character-driven books, this is for you.

“They had a rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it”

To me, this book at its core is a story about friendship. It evolves and can be challenging especially when success and failure are involved. We see them deal with working with friends, maintaining a successful company, dealing with their own insecurities, love triangles, grief, and the value of having an alternate world to escape to.

I am a sucker for full-circle moments and this book had so many. We do not live life in a vacuum and so many parts of who we are, whether intentional or not, come from the people we keep around us. I loved all the moments where Sam or Sadie picked up something they learned from with Dov or Marx or their grandparent.

I enjoyed the flips of POV and the unique perspective of feeling like a video game character. I don’t identify as a gamer but I did enjoy them growing up and any opportunity for escapism. Still do, but I think this has transferred to reading. But I still appreciated the moments in blending reality and the gaming world. So even if you have never played video games, I still feel you can connect with this story.

Life can be quite cruel and exhausting and it's truly the people in it, the ones that make you want to keep playing that make it worthwhile. The parts surrounding grief were so sad I cried. And tbh I’m still VERY upset.

I wish I could have Marx’s kindness and patience, Sadie’s talent, and Sam’s resilience.

Such a unique and moving coming-of-age story.

This book felt long, like 600 pages but in a good way. I’ll miss Sam, Sadie, and mostly Marx - the best character in my opinion. if someone knows where I can find a Marx, please let me know.

The writing in this book was exceptional. It was a novel of friendship and the challenges that a lifelong friendship may bring and it showed that anyone can start over. I loved Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and I’m not into gaming! I highly recommend adding this one to your TBR if you haven’t already.

I really enjoyed this beautiful book. The writing is exquisite and I wrote down so many quotes as I was going through. It's unlike anything I've ever read before and these characters and this gaming world are so special. It really makes you think and I love the message that every day is a new start. It was very long and it's not a book that you can fly through - you don't want to miss a word and it took me 2 weeks to read it (which is about 3x as long as I typically take to read a book). I'm both glad that I took my time with it and also found it a bit stressfully never-ending, haha. I used to like The Sims but that's where my knowledge and experience of gaming ends, and it didn't matter at all. In fact, this book almost makes me want to try gaming (almost!).

[4.5 Stars]

I found this to be a really great character study of a bunch of complex individuals. There were also plenty of topics (i.e. gay rights, appropriation, disability, mental illness, etc) that were covered. The only thing that I was continuously disappointed by was the lack of discussion around how they were forced to change Ichigo's gender from nonbinary to male just for the sake of marketing. I really wish that hadn't been as brushed over as it was.
Overall though, still a really really interesting read. I would recommend

Thank you so much to net galley for sending me a copy of this book! At first this book took me a while to get into the chapters were extremely long but the more I read the more entranced in the story and the characters I was. It was a heartbreaking sorry that I will never forget.

A Bookstagram favorite, I’ll admit I was hesitant to pick this up thinking it was a book about video games but the more I heard about it…trigger warnings galore, a little dark and sad? Well that’s my kind of jam. This story is about video game creators, Sadie and Sam, who meet as kids in a hospital and end up intertwined the rest of their lives. And in the same vein as Backman writing about hockey but not writing about hockey…this book about video games is not about video games. It’s about finding your passion, about love and friendship, about pain and grief, and a lot in between too.

The warnings about content are real. This is not a happy book. Still, I was surprised by how much I loved this story and these characters. Marx, especially, broke my heart a million times. When I started the book I was grumbling to myself about the title, like how dumb is this with the word Tomorrow so many times. Can we just call it Tomorrow? Of course by the end I got it and it’s perfect.

I ended up feeling like it was a little too gamey as it wrapped up. I know I just said it wasn’t about video games but yet too much of that held me back from proclaiming this a new favorite. Still it was really, really good and worth all the buzz.

Like many others, I loved The Storied Life of AJ Fikry. Also like others, I was hesitant to start this one because I am not a gamer. However, I heard a reviewer describe Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow as "a light version of A Little Life," and I was dying to find out how these two books that seem so different could possibly compare. Regardless of my lack of video game knowledge, I easily fell into the world of Sam and Sadie. I felt their excitement, their connection, their frustration, and their heartbreak. Zevin creates characters that are so easily relatable! In the end, I actually do think the reviewer's comment was correct; thankfully the world of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is not as heavy and overwhelming as A Little Life, but it still allows the reader into a world of beautiful friendships and physical and emotional pain. I would recommend it to just about any reader!

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

This book surprised me. I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it or not and I loved it. I have a book hangover.

I loved reading the aspect of how games are made. My husband is a huge gamer and trust me, there has been a lot played in this house. I like to play games but it really made me appreciate it more. Also, I knew all the titles that were mentioned (thank you, husband). I’m going to try to get him to read it too because I think he will appreciate that aspect.

Great story. The ups and downs. It really touched me.

What a special book. My favorite of 2022 (Black Cake + Lessons in Chemistry also in the Top 3). Full review to come after I process what I just read. It was THAT GOOD.

I found it really hard to write a review of this book because I have so many different feelings about it. Some parts of it I flew through, some parts I struggled to get through. I loved that the ultimate theme was love and friendship against all odds, but I found a lot of the gaming stuff really tedious. I had read that the gaming was a background theme to the friendship theme but I didn't find that to be true. For me while love was the theme it was carried on the vehicle of gaming and that coupled with the short, sharp writing style made it really hard for me to connect with this book.

I love it when books take me into worlds that normally wouldn’t interest me and makes them compelling. In this case, it’s gaming. Sam and Sadie have been friends since childhood, brought together by chance in the hospital. After years apart, they run into one another at the Harvard Square T-stop and strike up a collaboration. Before graduating, they, with the support of their friend Marx, build a video game that propels them to success.

This is the story of their friendships, told over decades, complicated by and held together by their professional partnership. Zevin has created a full collection of wonderful characters, but her main three–Sadie, Sam, and Marx–truly shine. I loved watching their love stories grow and evolve, and how their connections hold through illness, failure, and tragedy. One of the best of the year.

Tomorrow x 3 is a book about video games. And friendships. While I am certainly not a "gamer," I do enjoy some video games (Mario, Tetris and of course, Oregon Trail). I loved the references to video games throughout the 90s and the way the story built on Sam and Sadie's friendship throughout the years.

However, I really disliked Sadie. I'm not sure if this was the intent of the author or just my reaction, but I couldn't like anything she did. From the beginning, I had no sympathy for her and thought she was a selfish, immature character who was also a lousy friend.

I don't get the feeling that other readers had this reaction and this is what made the book tough for me. I think you're supposed to root for Sam and Sadie to succeed in life, as friends, in video games, but I just wanted Sam to tell her where to go.

The storyline on this was good and I do like how everything developed over the years, but my dislike of Sadie kept me from giving it five stars.

Thanks @aaknopf & @netgalley for the eARC

You ever have a book you know you'll love, but don't get to it, and reviews come out, everyone loves it, and you know you will, but you don't read it, and people start telling you directly, "hey, read this," and it goes unread, and finally read it in one six hour marathon and think your past self is a huge ding dong for putting it off?

Well, me & past Kelly have a lot of beef - beeves - and this is one. A burger, perhaps. This is exactly what I enjoy in several favorite books. It follows a small group of people for an extended chunk of life, like a Prayer for Owen Meany or A Little Life, without the political weight of APfOM or heavy angst of ALL. Few MAJOR events, just the story of these people.

It's set in the 80s-early 2000s & has a lot of enjoyable references, especially to video games, but "getting" them a necessary part, like Ready Player One. There's a lot about game dev, in the way that it's interesting to hear about ANYONE'S job, not just for People Into That Kind of Thing.

It didn't quite make 5⭐ for me, tho. This is my kind of story, but unlike APfOM or ALL, the characters felt distant. They're great, but for me, this was definitely more about the story, rather than connection with characters, or even being really taken with their relationships. It just didn't give me That Feeling.

Still! Definitely a recent favorite.

I’m so torn on how I feel about this book. I had such high hopes from all the chatter I heard about it. I enjoyed reading about the games they created. There were some really great quotable lines that I highlighted. And I love a story that follows people across a big span of their life. I appreciated that aspect of this book. But the story just left me underwhelmed. I don’t think I left this story liking a single character except maybe Marx. (Dang it!) Maybe that’s not important for you. If you’re into kind of depressing stories about messed up people then you’ll probably find this interesting. For me it was a miss.
But thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book!

Contemporary Fiction

I have not written this review in a timely manner and I think part of the issue is I don't quite know how I feel about it. On the one hand, I really liked parts of it and on the other I was bored.

This book is about friendships - the ups, the downs, the fights, the make-ups and how those friendships shape you as a person and change the arc of your life.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is one of the BEST books I have ever read! The character development is masterful, as is the unfolding of the story over time. I didn't want it to end!