Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
2023 Frenzied Bibliophile Challenge Category: A recommended boo
Rating: 4.5/5
Will you like this book? You might if you like:
Friendship stories
Even if you know nothing about video games
Women in STEM
Fondly remembered Fred Savage’s classic “The Wizard”
Donkey Kong
Are nostalgic for a) video games from the 90s and b) Cambridge in the early 2000s
Sam and Sadie bonded over video games when they were children. After years of separation, they are reunited while they are both in college in Massachusetts. They come together and create a video game which is an instant success and catapults them into a whole new realm. As their game takes off, they learn to navigate a new world and are challenged to recreate the magic of not only their first game but their friendship. It is a story of coming together and breaking apart, over and over, and in different ways. Sam and Sadie are at the heart of the book, but what they create, they can’t do alone and the people that help them are just as interesting, and integral, as the main characters.
So I really enjoyed this book for many reasons, but I think a large part might have been that Zevin tapped into the nostalgia of those of us born in the late 70s and early 80s who cut our teeth on the pizza parlor video games and then graduated to Nintendo and then on to Sims. Reading this book reminded me so much of my childhood. And as our MCs are at Harvard and MIT, Zevin placed them squarely with me back in the early 2000s as I lived near Harvard Square. With the opening scene I could just see myself getting off the T, heading into the cold like Sam.
It’s a clever book and, maybe because I was traveling the day I started it, I was able to read, uninterrupted for a few hours, one that pulled me right in. It was a refreshingly different story, it could have gone in so many different directions. There were a few parts that I thought could have been trimmed a bit but overall, I thought the writing was excellent and I very much enjoyed the read.
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