Reviews with content warning for Hate crime - Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

First, the characters generally fell a bit flat, what little development Sam and Sadie made still wasn't enough for me to like them. I would've liked to see their relationship develop (doesn't even have to be romantic) instead of 20+ years of on-again/off-again friendship. Sadie specifically annoyed me, she was so hypocritical. Sam was not a great person but at least he was consistent. Marx was so boring, he had no real character except "perfect and everyone loves him even his exes". I didn't even care when he died. Also Dov was obviously abusive and I felt like that was just glossed over. I don't think the book was condoning his treatment of Sadie, but it was also not condemned. He continued to be a part of Sadie's life, which just feels like a weird message by the author.

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Overall, I think the first half of the book is compelling, the second half is a bit of a slog. The premise was there but I feel like the author bit off more than she could chew with this one. Generally her prose is good but at times felt overly intellectual and out of place, please Zevin put down the thesaurus.

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maura_kathleen's review against another edition

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inspiring reflective fast-paced

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

4.25

My first read of 2024!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my approach to rating on this app. As the calendar flipped from 2023 to 2024 and I looked to close the year on a major reading high, I became a bit obsessed with adding books that I read prior to joining this site to my reading history, as though it would be rude of me to mislead an app into thinking that I had never picked up a book before 2022. I did not rate books before I joined StoryGraph, and I at least in recent history did not keep a log of books that I had read until 2021, when I started doing so as an accountability measure to stave off a relapse of the reading slumps that pestered my post-college years. I have since added everything (novels, at least… a decent bit of manga that I haven’t added) I recall reading since 2019 or so to this site and have started the process of adding books that I read in college and earlier. I have decided on a blanket basis to not add star ratings to books that I last read before 2019, even books that I have read multiple times and know quite well, in an attempt at fairness.

In part, I feel that a star rating is a poor measure to take of anything, books included; it flattens and diminishes a range or a flux of responses into a metric that says very little. But the parts of my brain that like organization and stat charts and engaging in critiques finds star cataloging satisfying. I have given in to the spirit of it, but I want to try to be methodical to make the metric more meaningful. I usually find a lot to like in things and have tended to rate very generously in the past, where called to, because celebrating what is good in a work seems more important to me than dwelling on what could have been different or better, and while I still believe in maintaining that kind of graciousness generally, I want to be more rigorous here. By my kind standards, lol.

I do not believe that a book rating can ever be entirely objective, and so my personal tastes and preferences will inevitably influence the way I rate.

I have decided to set the baseline for books that I esteem and enjoy at a 4. “Esteem” for me endeavors to encompass craft — prose, structure, themes, execution, etc. — how successfully a book is what it means to be. (I try not to judge a book too much based on what it is *not*, but in some cases that is relevant.) “Enjoy” overlaps with that, particularly because I have a strong bias toward works with engaging prose, but it also allows for my emotional response and level of engagement with a text, affection for favorite subjects or characters, nostalgia and sentimentality and peeves, respect for a work’s scope or range or originality, etc. I have esteemed some books better than I liked them and enjoyed some others better than I respected them, but I try to balance those factors in my rating. Books rated 4 score generally well on both fronts but may represent a balancing point. My history should show that the average rating I gave to books read in 2019-2023 was indeed about a 4; I believe this speaks less to leniency than to the fact that I tend to be good at screening for books that I think I will like. All of my lowest ratings were compulsory reads for book clubs.

To go higher than a 4, then, a book has to start being really excellent at some or many levels. By 4.75 I consider everything basically outstanding, and I have a few there that verge on a 5, but I’m trying to reserve 5 for the absolute best of the best. I have currently given it to only four books. I do not think it is true that I have only read four 5-star books ever, but again, I’m not rating books from before 2019, and I may have also been more circumspect in rating books even from before 2023 because of the time elapsed since my review.

I’m hoping this methodology doesn’t interfere with my ability to sink into a read in the future. I don’t want to be constantly quantifying what a book has “earned”. I also must not take myself too seriously LOL.

I’m also sorry for polluting this particular review with my thoughts on rating rationales! I will move it if I find a better place for it — not sure if the profiles here include any kind of bio text.

Anyway, I had a really good time with “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”. The premise was attractive from the start and engagingly delivered throughout. I tend to love works about the creative process — the more detail-rich, the better — and I have enjoyed video games all my life. The story of the games within the novel had great “Shirobako” upside. The novel brings the industry vividly to life and makes it integral to its thematic interests, probing what draws people to create and what can be captivating about gaming, in particular. The liberation and constraint of play. The game space’s ability to make sense of or compensate for what the “real world” lacks. (Relevant “Y/N” quote: “I'm tired of experiencing reality as that which happens strictly to me.”) Zevin weds the gaming experience of repetition, trying again, starting a new life, attaining a particular type of immortality, chasing perfection, etc. into her narrative beats and her theme-work.

The pacing kept me hooked all the way through, although I did have to take a breather when

I reached the 70% mark and word of the shooter arrived and I was immediately certain that Marx would die and couldn’t handle it — more on this in a bit

. The prose was, if conventional and seldom fully dazzling, at minimum better than adequate, polished and nicely descriptive and capable of being both very moving and very funny. (A lot of the jokes in this were very well-tailored to me, as a lapsed theatre kid born in the 90s who enjoys video games and Japan lol. The “Love Doppelgängers” renaming scene made me laugh out loud. One brief nitpick while I’m on this topic, though… the first game is titled “Ichigo: A Child of the Sea”, which means that Sadie and her student get the Japanese title wrong at the end of the book, no? They called it “Ume no kodomo”… “sea” is “umi”; “ume” means “plum”.) I did have some issues, particularly toward the beginning of the book, with the placement of narrative information seeming a bit haphazard — paragraphs veering inorganically into tangent — but that improved as the novel progressed. The handful of main characters were mostly strong, and how their backgrounds and identities influenced their experiences throughout the novel was well-articulated. Occasionally the level or duration of conflict between Sadie and Sam would stretch my suspension of disbelief, but hey, people are flawed and hurting.

Marx was my favorite character, naturally. As mentioned above, I had to stop reading for a day when I knew he was going to die, which managed to help me moderate my emotions about it. Zevin’s choice to adapt the writing style for that section of the book is interesting. I could see a case for viewing it as emotionally manipulative (a writer’s prerogative), and I do feel like the circumstances of his death were a bit cheap, or somehow out of scale with the rest of the novel… I don’t know. The novel wasn’t terribly interested in the progressivism or lack thereof of Unfair’s games, although the characters’ perspectives on gender, race, and ableism did inform their creative choices, until Simon and Ant entered the story, which may be a decently fair framing of the way that a lot of people and corporations came to adopt more progressive stances or open political positions on gay marriage in the 2000s, when a cultural sea change was continuing to take form, but Simon and Ant never received quite enough page time, to the point that I felt like their story was the product of a second draft addition to motivate the circumstances of Marx’s death, which furthermore relied on some sheer unluckiness. Then again, that’s death sometimes, isn’t it? Aside from the bigotry behind it all — judgments and unfortunate timing and trigger reactions and being a hero all matter an awful lot… in both video games and in life… which is the connection I think her style here was drawing. Having prepared myself for Marx’s death, the passage of the book that really walloped me was the bit where Emily/Sadie leaves the Oregon Trail-inspired game afterward… the paragraph where she expresses her gratitude, implicitly and explicitly, for Sam’s outreach and for having been able to come to a place where the buffalo (or oxen?) are given safe passage is a fine, fine piece of writing. So gentle, so moving, so earned — just a touching reflection on what can make the weight of grief a little less heavy and gratitude for the people compassionate enough to share visions of a sweeter life. That single page elevates this book for me.

I’m way out of time, so I’ll cut off my thoughts here, but this an excellent novel and one that I found motivating and affirming as an aspiring creator. The highs and lows of the life all fit here.

Content Warnings

millie_kawakami's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective sad 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

5.0

Content Warnings

sierracharlie's review against another edition

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challenging emotional medium-paced

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

4.5

A story about friendship with love and loss and everything in between.

I’ve never read anything like this before. As a mystery and romance reader I don’t understand the lack of finality in the ending but I enjoyed reading their story even if a little infuriating at times.

Content Warnings

ksolesby's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

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

5.0

Content Warnings

getlostmatilda's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

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

5.0

Content Warnings

hannah_dv's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced

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

3.25

It’s a fun book in being about video-games and the creative process but I do think the author was trying to do too much and seemed to use the book to virtue signal her opinion on every possible issue.

The book has suicide, car-crash, chronic pain, amputation, DV, shooting, death, LGBT violence

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