A review by mc_easton
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

emotional fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.5

Look, I know a lot of people love this book, but it just wasn’t for me. My strikes against it could be exactly what draws someone else to it: 1) A predictable love triangle. 2) A focus on relationships, which are almost always conveyed through scene. In contrast, the creative process is usually presented in summary. It’s supposedly set in the video game industry, but it honestly could’ve been set in any creative field. This is definitely not “All the Light We Cannot See” in terms of detail and research. 3) An inexplicable lack of women characters, which results in the novel failing the Bechdel test—not to mention the use of LGBTQ+ identities as walk-on roles to indicate the straight cis characters’ progressiveness. 4) An equally inexplicable erasure of sexism in the tech/gaming industry. The reality of widespread harassment and discrimination is, in this depiction, replaced with a lot of victim blaming: Sadie is “too sensitive” over who gets credit and “too idealistic” to expect men to not stalk, gaslight, or prey on her from positions of power. 5) A main character who has an incel phase, which includes stalking a grieving woman online and in-person despite her telling him repeatedly to leave her alone. But hey, the novel pretends it’s all okay in the end. 6) The only woman character doesn’t get much of an arc. We’re also meant to see her as strong, yet she remains friends with the men who have mistreated and used her (typical of rape culture, which has a vested interest in normalizing women’s tolerance of abuse from men, the better to accuse women of “overreacting” if they resist or speak out). 

Basically, it reads like mainstream YA. So if that’s your jam, you will probably love it. But since this was billed as literary fiction, I expected it to dive into how our video game experiences intersect with our “real lives,” the fluidity of virtual identities, and the role of AI—in populating our alternate lives as well as resurrecting our dead. It doesn’t really concern itself with those questions. I also expected the title—drawn from a line in a  speech from Shakespeare’s Macbeth about the inexorable march toward death—to have some bearing on the novel’s themes, structure, and characters. It doesn’t. There’s a misread of the speech as a hopeful message about rebirth (it is not), and an explicit statement that it can be about getting another life in games (it cannot), and that’s it. There’s little subtext, less symbolism, and no lyricism. Every point is stated explicitly, which is a hallmark of YA that doesn’t trust young readers to read between the lines. If I’d known it was going to be a light popcorn read with some regressive gender politics, I might’ve enjoyed it more. Hopefully, this can help someone else pick it up with more reasonable expectations.
Expand filter menu Content Warnings