Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Publisher: Viking (Penguin Random House Canada), 2022 (Hardcover)
Length: 397 pages
Genre: Adult; Realistic Fiction
Started: July 30, 2022
Finished: August 1, 2022
Summary:
From the inside cover:
In this exhilarating novel by the bestselling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, 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 favours, 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.
Review:
"The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world, don't you? I'm terrified of that world, and I don't want to live in that world, and as a mixed-race person, I literally don't exist in it...And as any mixed-race person will tell you - to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing" (Zevin, pg. 78).
"How do you get into making video games anyway?"
Sadie hated answering this question, especially after a person had told her that he hadn't heard of Ichigo. "Well, I learned to program computers in middle school. I got an eight hundred on my math SAT, won a Westinghouse and a Leipzig. And then I went to MIT, which by the way is highly competitive, even for a lowly female like myself, and studied computer science. At MIT, I learned four or five more programming languages and studied psychology, with an emphasis on ludic techniques and persuasive designs, and English, including narrative structures, the classics, and the history of interactive storytelling. Got myself a great mentor. Regrettably made him my boyfriend. Suffice it to say, I was young. And then I dropped out of school for a time to make a game because my best frenemy wanted me to. That game became the game you never heard of, but yeah, it sold around two and a half million copies, just in the U.S., soooo..." (Zevin, pgs. 235-236).
"Sadie was not a natural mother, though this was not a confession one was allowed to make. She craved solitude and personal space too much. But she loved this girl nonetheless...Sadie did not feel that her daughter Naomi was altogether a person yet, which was another thing that one could not admit. So many of the mothers she knew said that their children were exactly themselves from the moment they appeared in the world. But Sadie disagreed. What was a person without language? Tastes? Preferences? Experiences? And on the other side of childhood, what grown-up wanted to believe that they had emerged from their parents fully formed? Sadie knew that she herself had not become a person until recently. It was unreasonable to expect a child to emerge whole cloth. Naomi was a sketch of a person, who, at some point, would be a fully 3D character" (Zevin pgs. 381-382).
There has been so much hype for this book lately. Thankfully my library hold on it arrived pretty early considering this was just published a few weeks ago, so I settled in and was utterly spellbound by this book to the point where I read for most of the day and stayed up until 3am finishing the bulk of it. It was so easy to get lost in this story and become invested in Sam and Sadie and wanting to find out what happened to them.
The story opens in an LA hospital in 1986. Eleven-year-old Sadie is visiting her older sister Alice, who is a cancer patient there, and comes across twelve-year-old Sam in the games room playing Nintendo. They bond over their shared love of games and talk until the nurses discover them. Sadie is asked to return to the hospital again to play with Sam, since his interaction with her is the first time Sam has spoken in the past six weeks since he was in a brutal car accident that killed his mother and permanently disabled his left foot. Thus begins Sam and Sadie's friendship, which picks up again in the late 1990s when they are attending Harvard and MIT and Sam asks Sadie to make a video game with him. What follows is an at times enjoyable and other times heart-wrenching romp through the world of corporate video game design (you don't have to be knowledgeable about or enjoy video games to get this story, but in my opinion is definitely helps), that explores how the choices we make affect not only ourselves but the people around us. Sam and Sadie are incredibly well-developed characters; you know an author does character development right when you read a scene and you want to both slap the character upside the head for the choices they're making, but you also can't fault them completely either because you know exactly what makes them tick.
The incorporation of video games into the narrative structure at some points is a unique choice that works incredibly well here. For those people who might bemoan a novel that revolves around video games, fear not, there are also a ton of literary and classical references to satisfy you as well. The book's title itself comes from the "Out, brief candle" soliloquy from Shakespeare's Macbeth, which pleased me to no end as an English teacher.
The book has wonderful biracial representation in Sam (and the author herself is the same racial makeup as Sam so she speaks from experience), and they talk about what it's like to be a mixed kid. I was pleasantly surprised at the disability inclusion with Sam as well, it's well done and though it's not a huge focal point in the story, it's discussed how his disability has affected his self-esteem and how it impacts his life. The story also discusses the sexism Sadie faces as a female studying at MIT and later trying to navigate the male-centric world of video games and trying to be taken seriously by the industry.
The themes of love and play are central to the story. Play (all play, not just video games) is how characters connect with each other and reach out after long absences or fights, it's just really sweet to see. Love is explored in an interesting way here. Sam and Sadie never become romantically involved, and when they're asked about it at multiple points in the book, they both say that they love each other, just not in that romantic way. They're creative partners, and I love how the book explores platonic friendships and establishes that people can love others in ways that go beyond the physical. Also, both our deuteragonists are bi/pan, so yay for queer rep as well.
Recommendation:
This is probably the best example of a coming-of-age story that I've read in a long time. It probably helps that it focuses on Gen-X experiences and feelings that I can relate to as an older Millennial. If you enjoy video games, stories with good examples of platonic friendship, great biracial and disability representation, or just a really good examination of how the choices we make affect ourselves and the people around us, give this story a go.
Thoughts on the cover:
I love the inclusion of Hokusai's The Great Wave against the colourful title font, it works so well once you know how the two elements factor into the story.
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