What a unique and artfully crafted novel! This is a book about video games, but really about love. And not even romance, but deep care that can withstand the most brutal curveballs the universe throws. The characters are exceptionally well-developed and the story moves at a nice pace. I'll be recommending this to all the book lovers I know!

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read so far this year. With strongly written characters, as well as numerous themes and symbols to unpack, this is a great novel for bookclub discussions. This is a carefully crafted book with passages begging to be highlighted on every page. Zevin’s writing has evolved since A.J. Fickry and Young Jane Young. I enjoyed both, but Tomorrow has more intricate plotting and more sophisticated writing than those earlier works.

The book, in large part, explores how we show love for each other when saying the words “I love you” don’t feel grand enough. The character of Marx shows his love simply by easing life’s journey for others, and I think that is one of the most amazing definitions of love I have ever read. If we were all capable of that kind of love, how wonderful this world would be.

Another dominate theme is the question of how do you want to spend “the limited time of our very finite lives?” Do you devour the world - moving from each new thing to the next - in an attempt to experience it all? Or is happiness found by settling into a comfortable groove, choosing one course and keeping to the path?

This is also a book about failure. Or rather, moving forward after failing. The video game analogy of multiple lives is used to great effect to illustrate the importance of failing upward. It’s ok to fail, just make sure to fail better the next time you try - get a little farther in the game than the last time. Move through failure like a gate and use the moment to pause and reinvent yourself as needed.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf Publishing for permission to read this ARC. This review and other musings can be found on Instagram @wellreadwyvern.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed this story. Despite not being a gamer myself and probably being younger than the target audience, I was easily swept up in Gabrielle Zevin's unique writing style and found myself able to be fully immersed in the story throughout. Sam, Sadie, and Marx are incredibly complex and well-developed characters, and I loved how the author gave the reader the space to decide how they felt about each person. I also appreciated the diversity in the characters, especially the inclusion of a disabled protagonist. The book is such a beautiful exploration of love, loyalty, labor, loss, and everything in between with extensive worldbuilding and a structure unlike anything I've seen in my recent reads. Overall, I really do recommend that everyone reads this book, and am excited to pick up Zevin's other works!

content warnings: multiple deaths of loved one, violence (including gun violence), infidelity

DNF @15%

This was one book I was really looking forward to - I had loved A.J. Fikry [and I know the dangers of comparing books, so that is not what is happening here - I just knew I loved that writing and figured I'd love ALL her writing and in seeing the reviews, I am not the only one] and so, without reading the blurb [I never look at book descriptions to closely because often the WHOLE FREAKING BOOK gets told to you there and it is such a disappointment to be spoilered this way], I requested this. It is rare, but I am really sorry I did [and hope that someone who'd love this book didn't miss out because of my acceptance].

First, I am not a gamer. Not even remotely. I have played three video games in my whole life [I am 55], with one of them being PONG. ;-) I didn't grow up with video games and even when they started being big, there was no way my mother was going to invest in something that cost that much money when eating was more important. So when they became main stream, I was older and so not interested. I would have rather read a book than play something on the TV [THIS is in no way a critisism of those who do game - what some people can do with games, and how their minds work just blows MY mind and well done you IMO]. All that to say, all the stuff they talk about in the book goes completely over my head. I am not into math. I don't know [or even remotely understand] code and coding. I can barely run my computer, much less design a game that PLAYS on it. I was really lost in a lot of what I was reading. Add in that I didn't really like the characters, and some of the language was just not my cup of tea, and I knew this just wasn't going to be for me.

I will be recommending it to several people though - people that I know that game and write code and do all that stuff. They will love this book and I think there IS A good audience out there for this. I am just not part of it.

Thank you to NetGalley, Gabrielle Zevin, and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

“𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘨𝘢𝘮𝘦?" 𝘔𝘢𝘳𝘹 𝘴𝘢𝘪𝘥. "𝘐𝘵'𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸. 𝘐𝘵'𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘣𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘩, 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘸𝘪𝘯. 𝘕𝘰 𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘯𝘵, 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘯𝘵, 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳.”

𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑𝐕𝐈𝐄𝐖: after years of not talking sam runs into sadie at T station in boston. one is attending harvard & the other MIT when they decide to take a semester off to build ichigo - the game that will launch their careers in video game design.

𝐓𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐒: this book was truly something so special. i can’t stop thinking about it days later. it was the most unique book i have ever read. three people bonding over creating video games, yet it was about so much more than that: grief, love, friendship, failure, disability. the depth the author gave to these characters and all of their experiences was just amazing. and i especially loved that we followed them across decades. i would read this book a thousand times over just to be with these characters again. also, as someone who isn’t a gamer at all i loved how detailed the author was when describing the complexities and different elements to the games. it made me feel like i was inside a game - and in some chapters we even were which was so cool. i recommend this book to everyone. if at times it feels a little slow (it did to me) definitely keep pushing through because it is SO worth it.

𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆: i loved it!

thank you so much to gabrielle zevin, netgalley and knopf for an ARC of this book on exchange for an honest review!

I have very mixed feelings about this book. I’m going to start by saying it was a really good book, but it just wasn’t the right one for me. I’m sure that a lot of people are going to love this book, unfortunately I’m just not one of those people.

I adored the characters and I really liked reading about them. Their individual lives, their friendships, and the journeys they went on both individually and together. This is definitely a character-focused book, and in my opinion it doesn’t have much of a storyline. It was hard not to love these characters. However I found this book to be quite hard to read and I was reading really slowly. I’m not entirely sure why, but it took a long time for me to read it. I was enjoying this book, but at the same time I couldn’t wait to finish it.

Although this book focuses heavily on gaming and the gaming industry, this book can definitely be enjoyed by those who don’t love games. The language was sometimes hard to understand because there’s a lot of gaming terms, but most of the time it was explained well or irrelevant to the main story.

Overall this was a good book, and this isn’t a completely negative two star rating. I was just hoping to love it more. There’s a lot of real-world problems that are talked about in this book, so some people may want to check the trigger warnings. This is one that I’ll be recommending as I’m sure many people will love it.

I had no clue if I would like this or not, as video games aren't really my thing, but the book stole my heart. I honestly recommend it to everyone, the characters themselves make it worthwile, but the writing and storytelling are incredibly strong, too.

I really enjoyed this book and I loved how well the writing just flowed. The writing was really well done. The characters were so easy to fall in love with.

Several people have told me that you'd like this novel even if you didn't play video games. While I think that is true, I'm not a gamer and I did enjoy the novel, I think it's real audience is with gamers. It's a love letter to games that I appreciated it, but felt like I couldn't fully enjoy it as someone outside the community. If you're a gamer or you know someone who is, I think you would really really love this book. If you aren't, you might still enjoy it, I did, but go in knowing that you'll sometimes feel like an outsider.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a charming novel about Sam, Sadie, and Marx through the course of their lives from childhood to adulthood. Sam and Sadie initially meet at the hospital while Sam is recovering from a car accident and Sadie's sister is undergoing cancer treatment. Through their time together they play games to pass the time. While Sam and Sadie have an unfortunate falling out, they are reunited years later while attending college. The rest of the novel follows Sam and Marx, roommates/friends, and Sadie as they make their first video game Ichigo together and grow to create Unfair Games together.

As a casual gamer, I did not realize the complexities of the gaming world or the challenges that would take place in creating games spanning from the 90s to the more modern day. However, that did not take away from my enjoyment of the book at all. The characters are fully fleshed out people with faults and shortcomings that make them charming and, at times, exasperating. My favorite character was Marx - so likeable and the peacekeeper between the more volatile personalities of Sam and Sadie. Even the secondary characters of Dong Hyun and Bong Cha (Sam's grandparents) are delightful.

The novel does go back and forth in time and also jumps to be "inside" the game worlds that Unfair Games have created, which can be disorienting at times. The jargon associated with the building of games was a bit lost on me, but overall this story is endearing due to the characters and watching their lives play out.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows Sadie and Sam through almost thirty years of friendship, collaboration, and heartbreak. After meeting as children and reuniting in college, Sadie and Sam create a video game together and end up forming a gaming company. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows their personal and professional successes and moments of devastation.

This is an incredible book that to me is ultimately about love, in its many facets. I found myself rooting for both Sadie and Sam, although not necessarily in a traditional "love story" sense. I was invested in the supporting characters: Marx, Dov, Zoe, etc. Zevin wrote these characters with a depth and compassion one rarely sees. This is a book that will stick with me for awhile as I continue to unravel the characters and themes that are so expertly woven through this story.

Solid 4 stars. This beautifully written book spans across a friendship of two lonely teenagers and their love of video games. Written from both points of view, of their ups and downs over the years in not only their relationships, but their relationships with others.

Although I am not personally a gamer, I loved Zevin's descriptions of their gaming world and how they created their games over the years.

This was a hard book to put down!

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for this Arc.

I loved this book, loved all about it. It hurt my feeling, it made me smile and it make me cry! This book about games and game design, brought these two people in my life and that's where they will stay. Now that I know them, that I watched them grow, I'll forever be invested.

This is a beautiful story about love and friendship, about depression and disability, about growing pains and games and all in between. Wonderfully paced, packed with emotion, written in two POV; Sam and Sadie, it will take you through their story and lay it all out for you, the vulnerable, the feeling, the shame, the love, the desire and need.

I hope you read it, it will be worth it!

If you like male-female friendship stories, work/co-worker dynamics, enjoy reading about young adulthood in the 1990s-early 2000s, and appreciate video game culture, this book may be for you. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is highly character-driven, slower-paced, and quite unique. I haven’t read anything similar, which I appreciate. However, my main criticism is how pretentious the writing is at times. In fact, I considered DNFing on a few occasions. I’m glad I stuck it out, because the ending is excellent. If this book sounds interesting to you, it’s definitely worth a try! I’m glad I read it. Thank you, NetGalley, for the ARC.

First let me thank #netgalley and #knopf for this ARC - comments are strictly my own!

4.5 stars rounded up! This is the newest offering from the terrific award winning author of The Storied Life of AJ Fikry, a book I loved. And this one is equally as impressive.

I enjoy a book that follows the course of a character's life over a number of years - this story spans about 30 years of friendship. And the best part is that they fall in and out of friendship, in and out of love, speaking to each other / ignoring each other. Just like real people. These people all felt truly authentic and I liked every character (even Dov) and what they brought to each other's lives.

I appreciated the inside view to video gaming and developing - personally I don't know anything about it but found the parts about gaming fascinating. I really like books that teach me about something without teaching me!

This book is one of the ones where characters will stick with you and draw you back to the story till it's done. And it's got a great ending. So highly recommended.

Can we pause for a moment to admire this beautiful cover? It’s breathtaking and so is the story of Sam and Sadie in Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin!!

I loved every bit of this book and was lucky to get a complimentary audiobook, digital galley along with BOTM version! Narrater Jennifer Kim and Julian Cihi have narrated so beautifully, you can keep listening to their soothing voices forever!

What I loved most about this book is the profound trust and unequivocal love between Sam and Sadie! If you haven’t yet please pick up a copy of this novel, you’ll not regret it a bit! I am looking forward to re read this book soon!

Thank you Libro.fm, PRHAudio for the complimentary audiobook and NetGalley for the digital galley!

I’m not a video game fanatic by any means, but I have definitely played my fair share of video games growing up. Even though nowadays, I don’t play video games as much as I used to, I still play enough to keep myself informed about the various gaming trends out there, mostly due to my nephew being an avid gamer. Overall, I would consider my interest in gaming-related stuff to be moderate, so the fact that Gabrielle Zevin’s newest book is about gaming, by itself, wouldn’t necessarily make this a “must-read” for me. Rather, what attracted me to this book were the following (in no particular order): 1) the timespan, which covered most of the 1990s through contemporary times, some of which mirrors the time period of my youth (though admittedly, the 1980s was a huge part of that as well); 2) the setting, with a large part of the story taking place in Los Angeles, which is where I grew up (and where I still live); 3) the intricately complex premise as described in the plot summary, which essentially promised that this story would be about much more than just gaming (which was indeed true!) and that it would be different from anything I’ve read before (also true!); 4) I’m a sucker for nostalgia and it was pretty obvious, even before reading this book, that there would be plenty if that throughout the story; 5) this is by the same author who wrote The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, which is one of my favorite books of all time. In the end, what ultimately drew me in and kept me reading were all of the above, yes, but also, the characters, who were all so realistically rendered — it was hard not to empathize with Sam and Sadie and, given all they go through, root for them even during those times when they made frustratingly horrible decisions. Oh and of course, there’s Marx, who plays such a critical role in both Sam’s and Sadie’s lives — these three characters, their trials and tribulations, form the heart of the story, though if I were to choose a favorite character, it would probably be Sam’s grandfather Dong Hyun, whom I adored despite his brief appearances throughout the story.

In addition to the brilliant writing as well as the wonderfully drawn characters, another aspect that makes this book stand out is its unique structure — there are segments that switch between different points of views and perspective, as well as scenes that take place in the gaming world and also in the real world. While it was a bit difficult to keep up with at times, the journey to the end was well worth he effort, in my opinion. This is one of those books that needs to be experienced to be effective, which is why I’m keeping my review deliberately short as well as vague. This is also a book that’s very hard to categorize, as there is a little bit of everything in here — there are aspects of multiple genres in here, from historical to contemporary to romance (though as the premise suggests, this is not a typical love story), with subtle hints of science fiction and nonfiction elements sprinkled in throughout. There is humor and warmth in the story, but there is also tragedy and heartbreak — though most impressive for me in terms of the structure is Zevin’s ability to incorporate such a wide range of current affairs and social issues into the story, but in a way that didn’t feel contrived or overwhelming. I felt that the story overall was way more complex than her previous works, plus the emotional elements were also well done, though for me, this one was a bit less poignant and resonant than The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, in my opinion at least (that book made me cry multiple times as I was reading it!).

While you don’t need to be a gamer to enjoy this one, I do feel that having some familiarity with the gaming world does make a difference in that it enhances the reading experience (at least that’s what it did for me). I loved the bit about the trick for getting Mario on top of the flag, (where was this tip 30 years ago when I was obsessed with playing Super Mario Bros? LOL!) as well as the various other references to games that I was familiar with (whether through playing those games myself at some point or hearing my nephew and his cousins / friends talk about them). Given everything that has gone on the past couple years, I was definitely happy getting the chance to relive those fun, nostalgic moments of childhood, even if only for a short while! Even if you’re not into gaming, I still highly recommend reading this one, as the story on its own goes deep — though some parts do take a little bit of patience to get through, but to me, the journey was worth it in the end.

Received ARC from Knopf Publishing via NetGalley.

I wanted to love this boom more than I did, but alas, it wasn’t quite my cup of tea. It felt like I was reading the book for longer than the 3 days it actually took. There were parts that dragged on and where I found the writing style to be odd.

I adored the concept and all the throw-backs to Oregon Trail and other 80’s/90’s memorabilia. The characters were complex and mundane and infuriating and brilliant. The development of the characters and the story line was done well. There are heavy topics covered, which was a bit unexpected based on the synopsis.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of the book.

Five stars for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. This epic book drew me in immediately and kept me turning pages until the end. I loved the richly developed characters. A tale of relationships, family, love and ambitions evolving over time, this story has it all. I was sad to come to the end! Excellent book!

I was provided a free copy of this from @netgalley in exchange for my honest review.
This is a love story to friendship, creativity, play, and gaming! It had real, flawed, amazing characters that I wanted to know more and more about. Sadie and Sam met as kids and bonded over their love of video games! Later in life, they reconnect and decide to create their own game, with the help of Marx. But don't worry, if you aren't a fan of video games, you can still appreciate this book.
Ultimately it is a beautiful story of how friendships get you through life, and how we can mess those relationships up, and hopefully fix them again. There are a lot of struggles Sam, Sadie, and Marx go through, and as flawed realistic characters they don't always make the right choices, but even still it is a hopeful and beautiful depiction of friendship and love.
I was fully invested in these characters lives!
Luckily for you it was released yesterday and you can go ahead and grab it straight away!