Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A Novel

It has been a long time since a book has left me as mesmerized and energized as this one, and a long time since I’ve felt compelled to write a book review. Which is to say , Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is that kind of a book , a fantastic book. A book that leaves you wanting to do something , to be someone , just beyond the horizon of your own predictability. It is the sort of book that lingers on your lap for some time after you’ve turned the last page, makes you want to clear your morning schedule after you’ve been up all night reading, just to spend a little more time luxuriating in Zevin’s infinite world of possibility. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is the kind of book that makes zealots of complacent readers and idolaters of aspiring and established writers alike. I will admit, I was in no way drawn to the premise of this book. I have no interest in gaming. Or programming. In fact , this 400 page novel, ostensibly about three Harvard and MIT educated video game programmers, sat on my nightstand looking pretty for about a month. And it would have ended there except I’m an aesthete by nature, and it really was pretty. So it could not go ignored for too long. The cover is a work of art in and of itself. Psychedelic Tomorrows appear like scratchboard art etchings, suspended against a “storm tossed sea”- the iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa originally fashioned in 1831 by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. And while they say you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover , in this case , you would be wise to do just that. TTT is not just a book about gaming. Yes it’s the story of three programmers coming together to build something that will come to define a generation. But it’s more than that. It’s a book about coming together to build something that is more than the sum of its parts. A book about friendship, ambition, disability, and triumph and all the different kinds of love you will inevitability experience along the way. Zevin’s world is a physical world but also a digital one, a world of infinite possibilities. A where players can be reborn and cheat death a thousand times. A place where disability won’t impede your ability to soar to new horizons. Or to craft those horizons. Her characters are unforgettable. All MIT and Harvard prodigies in their own rights, we have Sam, a disabled Jewish-Korean orphan, Sadie, an Ashkenazi California native and Sam’s childhood best friend, business partner and fellow gamer. And there’s Marx, a Korean Zac Morris of sorts whose effortless beauty, generosity, and charisma often obscure the fact that he is as brilliant and creative as his quirkier tech-centric peers. In the 400 beautifully written pages of Zevin’s latest novel , These characters come together to form one of the strangest and most beautiful love stories you’ll come across in modern day literature. Friendship, as it turns out —-may be the greatest love of all. I won’t say more . At a certain point . You have to let the work speak for itself . Five stars

I love a book that takes a topic that doesn't particularly interest me (i.e. gaming) but still manages to make it such an interesting and incredible read. I am far from a "gamer", and while this book mostly revolves around the gaming industry and uses a lot of terminology and talk that I wasn't always able to follow, I was still able to feel engrossed in the story and was just as invested in it. Alongside with gaming, this book also does an amazing job at exploring various friendships, relationships, etc. and seeing how they change over time. I really do enjoy a story that takes place over a period of time and seeing how the characters and their relationships change with them, and this book is an excellent example of that. That being said, I feel like there was a portion of the book where my interest level dropped a little (about after the first 1/3 of the book). I feel like the characters became a little stagnant at that point, seemed like there was a bunch of unnecessary drama, and fell a little flat for me. And I was starting to feel very disconnected from the characters. BUT... then the about 3/4 of the way in.... Gabrielle just hits you with the biggest punch to the gut I've gotten from a book in a while. And I was left with my jaw hanging open, and realized just how close to the characters I was in that moment. All feelings of being disconnected were gone, and I was left with my heart on the floor. But seriously, that chapter (Part VII: The NPC: You are flying. - you know the one), was one of the most tragic, beautifully written chapters I've ever read. Whether you enjoyed the book a lot, or none at all, no one can deny how emotionally impactful that chapter was. I'm still reeling from it. This was one I listened to on audio, and was definitely a good choice. The narrator was amazing, and did an incredible job at bringing the characters to life. While this book wasn't a knock out 5 stars for me, it was still an amazing read and definitely recommend it to everyone.

I haven’t played a game since my teenage years and I am 53. I passed on this book so many times based on the “gaming” subject matter but I decided to give this a try based on the reviews. Needles to say, it surpassed my expectation. This is a story about relationships, hardships, resiliency, youth, stupidity, stubbornness, love, and finding your way. There are many lessons in this book that can be learned about life. I thoroughly enjoyed it and cannot recommend it enough, even to non-gamers. I will definitely read more books by Gabrielle Zevin. What an imaginative mind!

I had no idea what to expect when I started Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. I had heard what an amazing book it was, that it was the book of the year for several outlets, and that it was a story about two friends making a video game together. But wow, was this book incredible! It touches on so many things, including the ups and downs of a multi-decade friendship, love, death and trauma, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s equality in the video game industry, mental health, race, and disability. I really don’t want this to be a spoiler, so I don’t want to give away too many plot details, but here is a brief synopsis: Sadie and Sam meet when they are around 12. Sam is in the hospital after a car accident. After their friendship is tested for the first time, they don’t talk for years, but they meet up again in college. It’s then that they decide to build their first video game together, along with their producer and friend, Marx. They create a game company and continue making more games over the years as their company grows and they become leaders in the video game industry. During this time, their friendship continues to be tested in so many ways as new colleagues come into their lives and love interests develop. A huge tragedy strikes, driving them apart for years. But in the end, their friendship comes full circle and begins healing once again. I LOVED the character development in this book. Sam, Sadie, Marx, and their colleagues and loves all felt so real—all with their own strengths and weaknesses. There are a couple very unique parts of this book. In one, Sam and Sadie are playing a video game Sam built, and the story is written from the perspective of their characters. Another breathtaking part has to do with a character in a coma and how they are processing the world around them. You don’t have to be a gamer to enjoy this book, because the true heart of this story revolves around the characters lives and relationships with each other. If you’re looking for a unique, beautiful, sometimes heartbreaking story, I highly recommend this book!

In many ways this novel is about my personal dream life. What happens between Sadie, Sam, and Marx, starting a successful video game company with friends, was my dream for ~30 years from the easily 80s to the just a few years ago. I did start 3 of them but we were not successful though, during my career, I was lucky to have worked on several seminal, classic, successful and respected games. In that sense I could't put this book down because in many ways it's the life I wish was mine, at least the happy parts about successful and respected games. Even worked at a company in Santa Monica in 1999 and a best friend and colleague lived in Venice Beach so all of that hit close to my heart. On the other hand the writing has all kinds of issues 1. Name dropping. This seems to be a new cliche but it's to name drop things of the era to try to set a mood/tone. I'm not someone who writes fiction so I'm not saying it's easy to do but however it's often done in a poor way in this novel. The way it's written often feels like someone wrote those names in bold and they seem artificially inserted rather than blending into the story. By names I mean which games they were playing, what movies they were watching, etc... 2. List paragraphs. Several times there are list paragraphs where author will write something like "Sadie was into a, b, c, and d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, o, p, q, r, s, t, u ,v, w". These list paragraphs don't work and instead feel like the author trying to show off that they can make a long list on some topic to prove their credentials. 3. Game tech bologna. The author likes the harp on how "game engines" matter. They don't. They don't make games look the same any more than photoshop makes artwork look the same or cameras make photos look the same. Fans love to argue about game engines but what comes out is not up to a game engine and it's disrespectful of the artists, designers, and programmers to credit the engine with any real influence on their work. Take the games Monument Valley, Beat Saber, Return of The Obra Dinn, Hollow Knight, Subnautica, Death's Door, Cities: Skylines, Hearthstone, Ori and the Blind Forest, Cuphead, Valheim. Are you really going to look at those and claim they're all alike because they use the same game engine? And no, it didn't matter in the 90s either. The point being the author clearly doesn't know what they're talking about when they bring up game engine issues. Maybe that's not important to the average reader but it's important to this game creator. 4. Game tech jargon: There's no such thing as "burning out a graphics card" from game dev. If you could burn out a card then games themselves would burn them out. That doesn't mean graphics cards don't go bad. It's writing like "How'd you do the reflections? Oh, it was so hard, I burned out lots of graphics cards on that" is BS techno-jargon 5. "Rare words", the author likes to show off by using words most people don't know. Nearly every chapter has a few that make you feel like you're studying for the S.A.T. They don't add to the story, they only detract from it. 6. The rom-com level cheesy conflicts - After Sadie and Sam had spent over 600 hours together, Sam discards Sadie because he finds out she was recording her time with him for "community service". No one in the real world would get upset at something like this. No one could spent 600+ hours with someone and share so much and toss it all over such a trivial thing. Real friends would laugh it off as something like "if I hadn't they wouldn't have driven me every day to hang out with you". This a common in bad rom-coms. The writers want some way to introduce a conflict but fail to find something believable so they just write that one character gets upset and expect us to buy it even if no one would be upset but such a thing.

I’m not a gamer. I know as much about expansion packs or role-playing games as I do about skateboarding or quilting (which is to say, not much). But that’s OK, because in "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow," you don’t have to understand gaming culture. You simply have to care about the people, and these are complex, frustrating, and human characters, so caring about them becomes inevitable. What Zevin does especially well is character development. Sam, Sadie, and Marx are not idealized, and thank God for that. They are brilliant, damaged, ambitious, withholding, petty, creative, selfish, and loyal. They feel real. These are not characters meant to be just adored; they are written to be known. Over the course of years, Zevin lets them grow, harden, unravel, reconnect, and misunderstand each other in ways that feel emotionally honest. And that emotional complexity is what made this book work so well for me. In sharp contrast to Buckeye (which I finished just before this book, and which somehow makes time feel emotionally inert), this one delivers the depth I want from a sweeping literary novel. If you’re going to ask me to invest in people over the years, I want drama, longing, and multi-dimensional characters. I appreciated that Zevin uses game design as a framework for larger questions. More than once, the novel asks: What is the difference between art and entertainment, and who gets to decide which is which? When something is commercially successful, do we dismiss it too quickly as “mere entertainment”? Or is that just another way of underestimating forms of art we’ve been taught not to take seriously? I loved that this novel never pounds the table on that question but simply makes the case by existing. For me, this lands at four stars because I admired it almost as much as I enjoyed it. This is a novel about people making things together and breaking each other in the process. And if that isn’t one of the oldest stories in the world, I don’t know what is.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow isn’t just a book—it’s an experience. From the very first page, I was completely immersed in the intricate, beautifully crafted world of friendship, love, and creativity. The characters feel astonishingly real; their joys, heartbreaks, and triumphs resonate deeply, as if you’re walking alongside them rather than reading about them. What makes this novel unforgettable is its exploration of art and collaboration. It’s not just about the stories we tell but the connections that shape us while we’re telling them. The pacing is perfect, balancing moments of quiet reflection with bursts of pure emotional intensity. And the writing—oh, the writing!—is lyrical, sharp, and emotionally devastating in the best possible way. I’ve read a lot of books in 2024, and this one stands out as my absolute favorite. It’s the rare kind of novel that makes you think about life, friendship, and creativity long after the final page. If you care about stories that hit your heart and stay with your mind, this is one you cannot miss.

Believe all the 5 star reviews! I am an avid reader, but I wanted to hold on to the pages of this book for as long as I could! Now that I finished it, I feel empty inside. Truly a masterpiece!

Very nice book, really recommend it!

As a female gamer who grew up in the same era as the main characters this book was fabulously nostalgic in its coverage of the games and gaming culture of that time. The characters are excellent and they tell a beautiful story of the trials of trauma, friendship, following your passion and identity and how these things shift and change. I especially liked the treatment of a platonic but very deep friendship as this is so rarely covered in novels or media. For me the main characters definitely come across as neurodiverse and their quirks are treated with an openness and without judgement (even if the characters themselves sometimes do judge their own quirks which is to be expected as they navigate the world). Loved this book and ended up reading it slowly to extend my time with these characters.

Enjoyed the book, love story with some ups and downs. Had a bit of nostalgia from some of the games mentioned in the books.

This book made me cry and get angry at people I don't know for the first time since high school. 10/10 read for any millenial who grew up with vidya and would like 400 pages of nostalgia hit.

I love the spray painted edges. Have not finished the book yet but it’s is very easy to read and I resonate with the characters so far.