Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

This book was super readable—I read it all in a weekend while on vacation in Italy. However, I never fully understood the basis for the relationship between Sam and Sadie, and am frustrated with how their friendship is portrayed with romantic undertones. I get that they’re both flawed, multi-dimensional people, but the development of romance just cheapens any “friendship” they have. It started off well, but as the book developed, I just kept wondering why they even stayed friends with each other, because their relationship just sounded unhealthy and stressful. Part of growing up is realizing that you don’t have to keep the same friends around you, that we all get busy with our own lives and that it’s OK to grow apart from friends whose interests, values, and goals shift, especially if those friends also cause emotional distress or hinder personal growth.

Synopsis

In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster,Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.