My silk pillowcase currently hates me, because I have soaked it in tears. My mom was very concerned as I came out of my room wiping fat tears off my cheeks and out of my red-rimmed eyes. She asked me if I was crying because the book was too sad. I told her no, I was crying because it had just made me feel so much I couldn’t help it. Then we both basically said the same thing: “Art is supposed to make you feel things. If it doesn’t make you feel something, it’s not good art.”

This book made me feel all the feels. My pillowcase tells the tale. So do my (now) swollen eyes. For about the last 15% of this book, practically all I did was sob as this book broke my heart and then put it back together piece by piece like an exquisite jigsaw puzzle. By the time the last words had come, I was practically shaking, overcome with a kind of relief I’ve never felt for two book characters ever before in my entire life.

Part of me had thought this book was surely overhyped. There was no way it could be as good as everyone was saying, could it? It was better than I had hoped. To me, this is Generation X in a book. This is me (born in 1978) picking up an original Nintendo game controller on Christmas morning in 1986 and playing Super Mario Brothers for the very first time and knowing life would never be the same. This is parents urging you to pursue what will make you money when you want to pursue what makes your heart race. This is putting up with casual racism and misogyny all the time because no one had ever said you didn’t have to put up with it. This was making the transition from landlines to cell phones and then never actually answering your cell phone but just texting. This was the transition from PC to console and then back to PC and then multi-porting.

This book wasn’t a book about video games. This book was about a generation raised playing them. This was a book about people who were raised knowing that video games meant infinite lives to restart but not infinite health. This was a book about a pair of people who knew real life contained infinite restarts but only one heart that could be broken so easily. In video games, they could live life after life and be whoever they wanted to be, but in the real world they were stuck being who they were, and sometimes being who they were was downright unbearable. But they could go to sleep, wake up tomorrow, and hit the restart button. But games get old just like people get old, and games get boring just like people get bored. And both the world and people can seem so bleak.

I insist you read this. It’s up there as one of the best 5 books I’ve read this year (according to GR I’ve read 361 books already this year), and I can tell it’s going to be stuck in my head, floating around there, making me think the philosophical and emotional thoughts for some time after this. You won’t be disappointed.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for granting me access to this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

A story of friendship that spans thirty years, Sam and Sadie go through the ups and downs of life. They meet when they are kids and bond over video games, than again in college, and as you guessed into adulthood. The highs and lows of friendship and falling in and out of love.

I liked the story and characters this book gave us. It was a fresh look into friendship a reflection of what life can throw you. The theme of love and loss definitely made this book what it is.

One of my favorite books this year. I loved the not predictable timeline/not a perfect back and forth with chapters. I really loved the diversity that didn’t feel forced. This is a winner.

📚Book Review📚 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin 🎧 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I finished this book at 1am, and it’s hard to succinctly put my thoughts about it into words. At it’s most simple, this is a story about a special male/female friendship, and the way that ebbs and flows throughout the travails of life. To summarize the plot simply does not do it justice because the story is so much more. Go read this book!

I also listened the audiobook, which was fantastic!!

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is my first book from this author and it was pretty good. I have seen quite a few blurbs saying that this is a book about gamers and gaming but I would say that this is a story about friendship, love and relationships over time.

Sam and Sadie meet in the hospital as children where he is there for multiple surgeries after a car accident and she is there visiting her sister who has cancer. They form a bond over playing Super Mario Bros in the TV room and she keeps visiting him for awhile until there is a betrayal that Sam cannot get over and they fall out of touch. Sam sees Sadie years later in his junior year of college (he at Harvard, Sadie at MIT) and they end up rekindling the friendship and collaborate on a video game that becomes a blockbuster.

The rest of the book follows Sam, Sadie, and their friends, family, and lovers as they navigate life as heads of a video game company and work through the sometimes frustrating task of maintaining friendships and relationships as we grow up.

Overall, I did enjoy this book but I found it to be a little long and the second half seemed to drag on for a long time, especially after a certain dramatic event occurs. I found the characters of Sam and Sadie to be very annoying at times and Marx was just a little too perfect. On the whole though, it was well written. If you are a fan of video games, I think that you will get a bit more out of the references but most of the games discussed are fairly well known in popular culture so the majority of readers should have an idea of what they are talking about.

This one started off a bit slow for me and I really struggled to get in to the storyline. I switched to the audio and connected with the story much better! I really loved the characters in this one and the gaming aspect really made this one great! Overall a really enjoyable read and definitely recommend to those who love a good character driven book!!

I really enjoyed this book, it was a pleasant surprise! I would recommend it to everyone, I mean it, everyone! It's that amazing!

Zevin writes a complex and thought provoking book centered around friendship and gaming. Sam and Sadie are well developed characters that you won’t soon forget. While gaming is not necessarily a subject I’m interested in, Zevin does a good job explaining the ins and outs, but the book does feel overly long at times, with some of the passages being quite tedious. For those that loved Zevin’s previous books...this was quite different! While I wasn’t a huge fan, it was well written. It will be interesting to see what Zevin comes up with next.

truly one of the best books I've ever read, emotionally devastating and one I can't wait to reread. These characters were rich and complicated and so real. The event at the 2/3 mark destroyed me, like ugly crying on the plane. This book has something for everyone and I need everyone to read it.

This book hooked me from the start! Sadie and Sam meet and become friends when they’re young kids. They bond over video games and eventually become video game designers. This book follows their friendship through adulthood and through its ups and downs. Although I’m not huge into video games (besides some older video games like Pac Man and Donkey Kong), I loved how video games was incorporated.
4.5 stars—only because sometimes I felt like I didn’t have enough background about video games to follow. The author did a great job of bringing it full circle & explaining confusing parts.

This book was devastatingly beautiful. The description didn’t jump out at me as something I’d generally pick up, but the stellar reviews convinced me. Wow, am I glad that I did. It is one of those books that by the time you get to the end you think, “I was a different person when I started this.”

It is jam packed with heart, emotion, and just everything I look for in a soaring novel. What an absolutely stunning book - it has supremely wrecked me.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a story about video games and two friends who create games together. While you don't have to love gaming to enjoy this story, you do need to be prepared to read a lot about video games!

Sam and Sadie have been friends since childhood, but they are both intense and their friendship ebbs and flows over the years. When they meet in college after not speaking for years, their connection sparks again and they set off to design a blockbuster video game. The novel spans 30 years and we really come to know the two characters. I quite enjoyed this novel!

5 dazzling stars
“If you keep playing, you could win.”

I am not a gamer. I am about Sam’s and Sadie’s age at the end - added together. I loved this book. I knew Zevin was an excellent writer from The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry and expected good things. What I got was a glimpse into another world (gaming) and the true pleasure of reading someone who crafts words into characters with all the emotions.

Zevin leads us through a children’s hospital and theatre and games and helps us understand the world a little better. Games offer a chance to forget one’s troubles, to ‘save the princess’ even if you can’t get out of bed, to work together, to start a new life. Tragedy is a part of our protagonists’ lives, but so is the possibility of Hope and Better. “It felt as if the universe was capable of being ordered. It felt as if it were possible to achieve a perfect timing.” Music is this for me, games for some, knitting, theater or sports for others.

Besides the deeply nuanced characters, I enjoyed the subtle humor/ irony throughout. Dialog rings true and is never clumsy or forced. Even chapter titles are clever. Zevin wields metaphors like an artist, surprises with unusual vocabulary (occasionally, never too much), foreshadows with expertise, flirts with political situations, and even puts a game in the book and on her website. Creative, tender, philosophical. Brilliant.

“Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans.”

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I am not a gamer, but still loved this book. The characters were interesting and truly likable. I felt like I needed to read it more slowly than I usually read, both to savor it and to look up the many obscure words peppered throughout. :)

Thanks to #NetGalley and the publisher for early access to this book in exchange for an honest review.

Sweet, surprising, and deeply relatable. This book is an exploration of a friendship over the span of decades. It would be very easy to make it superficial without ever pulling out the insides of these characters but what Zevin has (once again) achieved, is achingly human characters. Her writing makes you feel like you KNOW Sadie and Sam, like you're living right along side them. I will continue to read everything Zevin writes.

I know I am one of the very few left who has not read a book by Gabrielle Zevin. All I can say now is better late than never. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is not the type of book that I would typically read. You do not have to be a gamer to enjoy this book. I knew very few of the gaming references mentioned.

Sadie Green and Sam Masur meet when young while Sam is in the hospital recovering from a horrific car crash that took the life of his mom and mangled his foot. At the time of meeting, Sam had not uttered a word in weeks. Sadie was at the hospital because her sister had cancer. The two struck up a conversation which was the start of a friendship that would span over twenty years in the book. I would like to think that the friendship continued the rest of their lives.

There were parts of this book that I absolutely hated. I wanted to shake Sadie and Sam. But there were parts that I absolutely loved. The characters have a depth in them that I found to be deeply moving. Sam and Sadie's friendship is one that we would all be blessed to experience once in our lives.

4.5 stars rounded up to 5. I really did enjoy this book much more than I was expecting. This story blooms. It is a story of layers upon layers.

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts & opinions are my own.

While I found Gabrielle Zevin's writing genuinely beautiful I ultimately found myself underwhelmed by the story in this novel. Part of my issue stems from the total unlikability of Sam, the male half of the hero/heroine team. There's a lack of character growth there that makes it impossible to ever find him anything but an arrogant, vaguely sociopathic asshole so stymied by his own pain that he can't even conceive of anyone elses.

I did find the descriptions of video game development and structure hypnotic and fairy taleseque. It was seriously disappointing to have to remember they weren't really games.

Run, don't walk, to pick up Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow! I was so excited when I received the eARC from NetGalley. I loved some of the games mentioned in this book, like Oregon Trail, The Sims, Harvest Moon, and I have a degree in Computer Science but I have read several raving reviews that you don't need to be interested in games at all to adore this book. It's much more about relationships. I did not want this book to end. I wanted to stay in Sam and Sadie's world forever. This book is for literally everyone. You will not regret diving into this book.

I loooooved loved loved this book! Such a stunning reflection on friendship, love, and the creative life. Cannot recommend enough!

All the stars for this one! I’m declaring Tomorrow x3 my book of the summer.

There’s so much to love here - 90s nostalgia (Oregon trail, the sims), pop culture references, a slightly unconventional love story. Those things aside, there’s a lot to unpack with this one - gun violence, disability, racism, homophobia, the creation of art, loss, friendship and love. Gabrielle Zevin really packs a lot into this story about three friends who as college students set out to create a video game, their initial success and subsequent events after their game takes off.

If you enjoy character driven novels, video game references, grew up in the 90s and 00s, I think you’ll enjoy this one. I loved it.