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 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.
by Mike
So my best friend pushed this one in my hands and basically said ‘no questions, just read it’. He was right. This hit me in all the right feels, breaking my heart and somehow, somewhat, mending it together.
As a gamer, artist, and depression survivor, I can say from experience that the author really captured both the artistic process and the deliciously quirky minds that make and enjoy video games. Pair that with an accurate portrayal of mental health issues, physical disability, and all it’s impact on the psyche and how the process of play and creation can truly prevent a mind from churning itself stuck, you get this book.
And, it is a deceptively thrilling mesh of narrative devices. The book relies on a directional messiness that is either exquisitely designed or intuitively crafted. It uses an achronological and anecdotal style within its character’s ego-riddled perspectives, that spans a scape of tension that firmly pulled me through the book at a steady pace, despite that I would probably not like the characters in real life at all. Continually compelling and relatable, Sadie Green, (Sam) Mazer, and their ego’s will be vivid memories of mine for a while, I suspect. I love them.
Nerd culture and its signature sense of humor are represented accessibly, and at least my own type of nerdiness and neurodivergence is refreshingly portrayed. The emotional arc delivered a gut punch with a kick for good measure, but I welcomed every page of it.
