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A review by rbruehlman
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
4.0
It's unusual that I have mixed feelings about a book; usually I have a cohesive "it was meh" or "I really enjoyed it" sense. This book had both gaping flaws and yet elements I really liked.
To summarize, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about a group of friends who endeavor to design a video game, and their ensuing lives through success, creative partnership, romance, and life's curveballs.
This book hit a strange chord with me with its focus on video games. I very rarely play video games now, but I deeply loved video games from age 8 to my mid-twenties. I've never wanted to design a video game, but it was a strange walk through memory lane nonetheless.
But I actually really didn't care for the video gaming angle! I felt like Zevin tried too hard, for one, and I also didn't think her depiction of video gaming culture in the 90s and early 00s was accurate at all. The video gaming world she created felt deeply reminiscent of the video gaming culture of today, where video games are cool and mainstream and of course girls play video games. I don't know how old Zevin is, but she felt a lot younger than me. I was, for all intents and purposes, a female gamer when video games weren't cool ... and being a girl who liked video games definitely wasn't cool. Video games were a fringe hobby. I didn't see this reflected in the book, really.
All said, the first half of the book is definitely heavier on video games, and I really struggled to get through it. It felt like this weird name-dropping of various famous video games in the 90s and 00s, without actually correctly getting the feel of the times then right. An uncanny valley written by someone who wasn't actually there. A fanfiction, if you will.
Lest I just come off as a nerd gatekeeping 90s and 00s video game culture, I found Zevin's writing unbelievable or poorly researched in various other places. In one scene, Sadie's hands "bleed" from coding so much... sounds like how Hollywood imagines coding! Trust me, as a software engineer, this would never happen and is kind of laughable--you spend way more time reading code than writing it. A doctor happily gives Marx Sam's medical information, a blatant violation of HIPAA. A woman who jumps off a building and breaks her neck has time to engage in a full-blown conversation about her name before dying. The video games she describes sound improbable--how earthshattering could Ichigo's graphics be in 2D? How on earth did Sam believably masquerade as two NPCs in a Harvest Moon MMO clone? Was ChatGPT creating the interactive dialogue for the other NPCs??
What made the book's writing suffer the most, though, was just how hard Zevin clearly tried to make Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow a commentary on current-day societal issues. There's nothing wrong with a book commenting on modern society, but Zevin practically forcibly shoved the commentary in. A classmate is triggered and demands a safe space in the early 90s--that kind of talk didn't emerge until the mid-2010s. No one would have even heard of a safe space in the 90s, nor would anyone have ever given you one. There's conveniently a mass shooter with homophobic grievances; they kill a main character, who in my opinion could have died just about any other less dramatic way and still kept the integrity of the rest of the plot. The books talk about trauma and kids these days being special snowflakes. I got the sense Zevin rolls her eyes at the trigger-happy world of today, which is fine and not necessarily something I even disagree with, but it felt so forced and not really very relevant to the book.
So I just dumped a ton of criticism on the book. If the book had so many problems, why did I rate it 4 stars? Yeah, I thought the book was wildly unrealistic sometimes and had a lot of rough spots... but where the book really excelled, especially in the latter half, was in the exploration of the relationship between Marx, Sam and Sadie. They were genuinely interesting characters, and the dynamic she painted between the three of them--the closeness, the explosiveness, the prickliness, the love, the distance--felt very realistic to me. There was no sappy love story where Sam and Sadie get together and sing kumbaya and get married and everything is great and wonderful. No, they spend a good portion of the book actually resenting each other, while also deeply respecting one another. Sadie and Sam were kind of like how I imagine John Lennon and Paul McCartney to have been; individually talented individuals who brought out the creative best in one another, yet, as their success grew, wanted to do different things and repelled one another. The qualities that made them so great together, drove them crazy.
Relationships aren't always neat and tidy. Sometimes the people we love the most are the people we have to keep at arm's length. Did Sam and Sadie grow as characters over time? Yes and no--they changed, as people do as they grow older. They grow forward in some ways, and sideways and backwards in others. I appreciated that messiness. Zevin may not write a realistic book in a lot of ways, but she did get relationships right.
Now I want to replay Super Mario 64.
To summarize, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is about a group of friends who endeavor to design a video game, and their ensuing lives through success, creative partnership, romance, and life's curveballs.
This book hit a strange chord with me with its focus on video games. I very rarely play video games now, but I deeply loved video games from age 8 to my mid-twenties. I've never wanted to design a video game, but it was a strange walk through memory lane nonetheless.
But I actually really didn't care for the video gaming angle! I felt like Zevin tried too hard, for one, and I also didn't think her depiction of video gaming culture in the 90s and early 00s was accurate at all. The video gaming world she created felt deeply reminiscent of the video gaming culture of today, where video games are cool and mainstream and of course girls play video games. I don't know how old Zevin is, but she felt a lot younger than me. I was, for all intents and purposes, a female gamer when video games weren't cool ... and being a girl who liked video games definitely wasn't cool. Video games were a fringe hobby. I didn't see this reflected in the book, really.
All said, the first half of the book is definitely heavier on video games, and I really struggled to get through it. It felt like this weird name-dropping of various famous video games in the 90s and 00s, without actually correctly getting the feel of the times then right. An uncanny valley written by someone who wasn't actually there. A fanfiction, if you will.
Lest I just come off as a nerd gatekeeping 90s and 00s video game culture, I found Zevin's writing unbelievable or poorly researched in various other places. In one scene, Sadie's hands "bleed" from coding so much... sounds like how Hollywood imagines coding! Trust me, as a software engineer, this would never happen and is kind of laughable--you spend way more time reading code than writing it. A doctor happily gives Marx Sam's medical information, a blatant violation of HIPAA. A woman who jumps off a building and breaks her neck has time to engage in a full-blown conversation about her name before dying. The video games she describes sound improbable--how earthshattering could Ichigo's graphics be in 2D? How on earth did Sam believably masquerade as two NPCs in a Harvest Moon MMO clone? Was ChatGPT creating the interactive dialogue for the other NPCs??
What made the book's writing suffer the most, though, was just how hard Zevin clearly tried to make Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow a commentary on current-day societal issues. There's nothing wrong with a book commenting on modern society, but Zevin practically forcibly shoved the commentary in. A classmate is triggered and demands a safe space in the early 90s--that kind of talk didn't emerge until the mid-2010s. No one would have even heard of a safe space in the 90s, nor would anyone have ever given you one. There's conveniently a mass shooter with homophobic grievances; they kill a main character, who in my opinion could have died just about any other less dramatic way and still kept the integrity of the rest of the plot. The books talk about trauma and kids these days being special snowflakes. I got the sense Zevin rolls her eyes at the trigger-happy world of today, which is fine and not necessarily something I even disagree with, but it felt so forced and not really very relevant to the book.
So I just dumped a ton of criticism on the book. If the book had so many problems, why did I rate it 4 stars? Yeah, I thought the book was wildly unrealistic sometimes and had a lot of rough spots... but where the book really excelled, especially in the latter half, was in the exploration of the relationship between Marx, Sam and Sadie. They were genuinely interesting characters, and the dynamic she painted between the three of them--the closeness, the explosiveness, the prickliness, the love, the distance--felt very realistic to me. There was no sappy love story where Sam and Sadie get together and sing kumbaya and get married and everything is great and wonderful. No, they spend a good portion of the book actually resenting each other, while also deeply respecting one another. Sadie and Sam were kind of like how I imagine John Lennon and Paul McCartney to have been; individually talented individuals who brought out the creative best in one another, yet, as their success grew, wanted to do different things and repelled one another. The qualities that made them so great together, drove them crazy.
Relationships aren't always neat and tidy. Sometimes the people we love the most are the people we have to keep at arm's length. Did Sam and Sadie grow as characters over time? Yes and no--they changed, as people do as they grow older. They grow forward in some ways, and sideways and backwards in others. I appreciated that messiness. Zevin may not write a realistic book in a lot of ways, but she did get relationships right.
Now I want to replay Super Mario 64.