Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

I knew that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow had gotten good reviews, and because I’d read and enjoyed a couple of other books by Zevin, I didn’t read the reviews too closely. Nor did I read the book’s blurb. I knew only that it was a book about two young friends who design video and computer games. I’ve never been a gamer, so I wondered if I might be the wrong demographic for this one. Too old and too print-based to grok (a word I recognized because I have read a little Heinlein) the topic, perhaps? A reference on the first page of it being “...the waning twentieth century” did not assuage my concerns. 

These fears were completely misplaced. Yes, there is a lot about gaming, and readers with experience in that realm will experience this book in a different way. What I loved were the characters, Sam Masur and Sadie Green, who meet as young adolescents in a hospital where Sam is recovering from surgery to repair his badly broken foot and Sadie is hanging out during her sister’s cancer treatments. The two bond over video games, beginning a two decade long relationship in which they grow, learn, bicker, create, separate, reunite, and then do it all over again. And again. 

Theirs is not a romantic relationship, though there are moments when it might have taken that turn. Instead, they become colleagues, co-creators of a game Ichigo, which becomes an international success before they graduate from college. With their friend, Marx Watanabe, they form a company, Unfair Games, eventually move from Boston, where they had been in school at MIT and Harvard and return to Los Angeles, where their families live. 

Sam’s grandparents, who raised him after the car accident that killed his mother and crushed his foot, are Korean-born owners of a pizza parlor in LA’s Koreatown. Sadie’s grandmother Freda, a Holocaust survivor, is the family member she is closest to. All are delightfully drawn characters, and it was wonderful to read a novel in which grandparents play important roles in the lives of their young adult grandchildren. 

Although Sam and Sadie are on the outs more often than not, they both recognize that when they can work together, the synergy is something special. Their early success only increases the pressure to develop the next hot new game, but Sam is still dealing with serious medical issues while Sadie tries to put her affair with her mentor Dov in the past. In the meantime, Marx and his girlfriend have split up, freeing him to fall in love with Sadie at last. Then a tragedy shatters their world. Can they pick up the pieces and begin to live - and create - again? Can a game bring them back together at last?

I read “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow” in less than 48 hours, emerging into the real world, rubbing my eyes and wondering at how alive Sam and Sadie’s world had been in the time I spent with them. This may well be what it feels like to come off a weekend spent gaming around the clock. 

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