Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Book Review

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.

This book is one of the most hyped books last year and I have always wanted to read this book because of the five star rating on Goodreads. So I was happy when I got a copy of this book and started reading on this one.

I have to say, I was slightly disappointed with the book and did not understand the hype on this book.

The story talks about two friends, Sadie and Sam who meet each other in the hospital and they both share their liking in video games Many years later, Sam and Sadie meet each other again at the university and the two pair up together to form the bestselling video games. And this book literally talks about their friendship and the ups and downs they had with their friendship.

The writing was really great and even though I didn’t really enjoy this book as much as I hoped I would, I think I will try out her other books. The first few pages were bit boring, then it got a little better and then it was not so good. I didn’t enjoy any of the main characters at all. To me, all the characters in the book seemed to be immature and does not respect each other at all. The only character I kind of liked was Marx who is Sam’s roommate and later on Sadie’s love interest. If I have to list out the things that I don’t like, I might give away spoilers so let’s just say, the characters did not appeal to me and I found the friendship between Sadie and Sam to be toxic.

Another reviewer mentioned that the story is pretentious and I completely agree with that. The wordings used in the book to me sound pretentious to me. I am not very familiar with video games as much and so the terms used in this book is all Greek to me. The content warnings of this book is sexism, racism, homophobia. However, the events that are happening in the book sounded a bit realistic to me.

Does this book worth the hype? I don’t think so. This book wasn’t great as the people labeled out to be but it wasn’t bad either. Overall this book worth three stars.