Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Very nostalgic, while reading it I felt urged me revisit a favorite video game from my childhood :)
Definitely a super hyped book, a lot of people told me they loved it, I wouldn’t say it’s life changing but a sweet story about friendship and the obligations we owe one another as kith and kin.
I typically hate when a major conflict driver is lack of communication, makes me want to shake the main characters, but I empathize with being young and confused and lost. I like that romantic love was not the central focus of the two main character’s relationship.

Content Warnings

zoeysdigest's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

An interesting weaving of gaming tech, friendship, romance and life. Personally found the book dreary because many situations could have been avoided if they characters simply communicated their feelings and thoughts. However I recognise that this reflects what we experience often in life, and the hesitation, passiveness and self-doubt that the characters exhibit are probably a reflection of people in our lives.

🎯 The dynamics of the different relationships in the book explored what intimacy can be: beyond just physical intimacy, the book showed how shared understanding and passion (for work, interests, hobbies) can be powerful and important connections to have in life.
🎯 The precision of language and words made the reading more meaningful.
🎯 A bonus if you’re a gamer and can appreciate the technical jargons
🤔 It felt too long when yet another layer of the issue was due to lack of open communication, the reusing of the same “problem” to develop the story felt repetitive and boring; though bearable.

Content Warnings

cynthianohemi's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

Content Warnings

vonrxyes's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

i can’t decide if i enjoyed this or not, lots of it made me mad, lots of it made me cry. all i can say is i couldn’t put it down, for better or for worse.

Content Warnings

wooblatoober's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional funny hopeful inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

i really enjoyed zevin’s ability to portray characters with generosity & portray ever-changing relationships, even with rifts, and just overall make everything feel real.

i’m obsessed with marx’s fruit tree motif. he’s ever-giving, and he’s beautiful, and he’s soft. the love he gives freely is so beautiful and bountiful and juicy and sweet, but not too much so, like a fuyu persimmon. for now, maybe because of my own experiences, i’m more hung up on marx’s death than sam & sadie’s stories and relationship.

zevin does an AMAZING job of showing how people and their relationships change over time. it’s crazy how much my opinions on the characters changed over time, waxing and waning and flipping between them.

specifically, i loved sadie at the beginning and felt sorry for how she was being manipulated, then disliked her toward the end, which isn’t even how every reader might feel about her, since she seems like such a real person, and real people have some people that like them and some people that don’t. conversely, i was a bit annoyed by sam for the beginning, thinking he seemed like any other toxic smart guy who thinks he’s smarter than everybody else, until i started LOVING him toward the middle, then i was a bit annoyed by him again by the end for his lack of communication, though i was proud of his growth and baby steps in communication.

this book reads like creative nonfiction. it’s remarkable. my only small complaint is a major spoiler (everything i’ve marked “spoiler” is a major spoiler though), and that’s basically the end of the book. tl;dr for the spoiler, i felt like the ending was just over the line of a little bit too late in the back-and-forth of the story to feel satisfied by it. i felt empty at the end like i do out of all the best books, but that emptiness came from events that happened before the ending of the book, and the ending was overshadowed by that and felt too little too late.

by sadie and sam’s happy ending, which implies that they’ll fight again in the future but will work to be better to themselves and each other, i was kinda over it. overshadowed by marx’s death, i had become done with sadie’s paralysis and easy-to-anger attitude as well as her ability to hold a grudge that outshines teen sam’s, and done with sam’s refusal to communicate, even if they had experiences or mental illnesses that facilitated those actions (or lack thereof).

Content Warnings

ninawilson49's review against another edition

Go to review page

sad tense medium-paced

2.0

i know people rave about this book and I am not sure why. It unsettled me and made me extremely uncomfortable most of the read. I am tired of the booktokers and their sh*t recommendations. Also the author is a zionist!

Content Warnings

ckiyoko's review against another edition

Go to review page

fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

This is a really well-crafted book, works with form and POV in really interesting ways, and felt like a very propulsive read. For all that though, I could not decide when I was reading it if I was enjoying it. I cared enough to continue reading, but I got to the end and still was uncertain if I enjoyed the experience of reading it, or would recommend it to someone else. I will say, the NPC chapter is beautiful and the callbacks in it feel earned.

I'm also deeply Not Thrilled with "Solution" being a blatant ripoff of Brenda Romero's "Train" that goes uncredited, especially given this book deals so heavily with the power dynamics in video game design and how often women are overlooked/uncredited.

For me, I also struggled with some of the moments of the book that felt like they handwaved the concept of cultural appropriation, and later the soapbox moments about how sensitive the newer generation is. They felt a bit out of place, and more like the bubbling up of some deeper seated anxiety from the author than something coming from the characters' reactions to their place and situations.

I felt this similarly in the explorations of Sam's experience as being mixed EAsian and white, which felt like they tread the same ground that's been tread before/existed more as a justification for the existence of mixed white and Asian people. I don't know exactly how to phrase it. It was just something that was off-putting to me as someone who is in that category because it feels like it's re-litigating the same conversation we've been having for years and played to the same tropes and lines, which felt...recursive? Like it flattened a complex and nuance experience to a monolith? I'm not sure, but at the very least, I found it exhausting to hear the same talking points I heard in middle and high school here. There was an element of self-consciousness to the explorations of this that felt, again, like someone else's insecurities about their identity bubbling up here rather than the character.

But yeah, pretty wild book. Well written, but felt kind of like a liminal space turned into a novel.

Content Warnings

More...