Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

A book that’d been popping up all over bookstagram for months, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow finally drew me in over Christmas and I at last picked up a copy of the beautiful UK hardback edition in the Boxing Day sales. And, when I say this is MY book…!

“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.”

The Review

What can I say about this book, aside from it is worth every part of its hype? Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is a novel that I did not know I needed, but is simultaneously MY book. A keen gamer myself, this is the first book I’ve read that features gaming as a central theme and it tackles it masterfully.

Sadie Green and Sam Masur are friends since childhood, brought together by hospital visits and a shared love for video games. When Sam leaves a subway one bitterly cold December day and sees Sadie Green on the platform, so begins a new game: a legendary collaboration between two curiously creative friends who will enter stardom.

There is something incredibly immersive about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow; Zevin skilfully conjures up a world so realistic that I found myself half-thinking I’d bump into Sadie on the Underground or glimpse Sam at a video game convention. Rooted in themes of friendship, love, escapism, perfectionism, autonomy and insecurity, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow draws incredible comparisons between the real world and the ones that we can escape into. The raw humanity that drives our main characters feels real and I certainly cried on more than a few occasions.

In creating Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Zevin also dives into the business of creation and how video games are created, produced, developed. This really appealed to the gamer in me, and, I suppose, the writer and reader too. It’s told in a gorgeously paced saga style, so you feel like you grow up with the cast of characters as they mature and experience different phases of life. Now that I’m in my thirties, this felt particularly poignant. One of my new, all-time favourites.

Favourite Quotes

  • As Sadie would put it in an interview with Wired, “The game character, like the self, is contextual.” In Koreatown, no one ever thought Sam was Korean. In Manhattan, no one had ever thought he was white. In Los Angeles, he was the “white cousin”. In New York, he was that “little Chinese kid”. And yet, in K-town, he felt more Korean than he ever had before. Or to put a finer point on it, he felt more aware of the fact that he was a Korean and that that was not necessarily a negative or even a neutral fact about him. The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist as the centre of the world, not just on its periphery.
  • We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.
  • He wished he could open up his brain and delete the bad code. Unfortunately, the human brain is every bit as closed a system as a Mac.
  • Ah, but Sadie Green was a gamer! In a game, if a sign warns you not to open a certain foot, you will definitely open that door. If it doesn’t work out, you can always go back to the save point and start again.
  • 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.

Rating: ★★★★★/5

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