Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Contemporary, fiction
Sometimes a book just leaves you speechless and unable to grasp your emotions, and that was Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow for me.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went into this or where the book fell in genre/subject. But, I marked it as “Now Reading” and saw two of my friends’ Goodreads reviews: “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to emotionally recover from this book” and “One of the best books I’ve read this year”. About 20% of the way through, I thought about their reviews and suddenly became scared of what emotional turmoil I might face, as if constantly waiting for a jump scare.
Still, I could not put this book down and even when I should’ve been focusing on something else, I was thinking about what the ending was going to be.
Honestly, it wasn’t as emotional as I was expecting and I don’t think that was a bad thing. The book was undoubtably worth the read.
At its core, this book is about the human experience. It is about friendship and loss, love, and of course, gaming.
Sadie meets Sam, around the age of 10, when she’s with her family at one of her sister’s many hospital stays. (Her slightly older sister, Alice, has cancer.) In a moment where Alice is getting irritated because, well she’s a sick kid and annoyed by her sibling, Sadie walks out of her room to give her space. A nurse recommends she go to the gaming room not far off and that is where she runs into Sam playing Mario. They easily fall into conversation, they both love gaming. When Sadie leaves, the nurse is surprised—Sam, who was a patient at that time, had not spoken to anyone for quite some time. Sadie was often at the hospital because of Alice and so began Sam and Sadie’s friendship.
The story follows the two, interweaving the past and present, as they are in and out of each other’s lives. Eventually, they reconnect when Sadie is at MIT and learning to create games. I won’t give too much else away, but Sam proposes they make a game together and they do.
The details of how they make games are some of the best parts of this book, in my opinion. The creativity and steps behind it strongly held my attention in moments when the story’s pace started feeling a bit slow. However, if you do not like games or are not curious about how they’re made, I still think you’d enjoy this read.
In the beginning, you get glimpses of their past and some pivotal moments in their lives that were sometimes heartbreaking or shocking to read, but necessary. If you’re worried, I’d recommend looking up trigger warnings. (I find they can be a bit spoiler-y, but if you disagree, let me know!)
Although its told in the 3rd person, you saw both sides of their experiences and oof. Here is one of the very few bones I have to pick with this book—the miscommunication. I understand why it was an element in the book, but there were countless times when I wished they would JUST talk to each other.
I also struggled a little bit with some of the words in this book. At times I felt like the author was purposefully trying to use the most obscure words and it did come off a little bit pretentious, especially in the beginning. In fact, my list of words I looked up or learned is SO long, I had to put it at the very bottom of this page!
If you’re looking for a romance, this is NOT it. This is not about two people who fall in love romantically and live happily ever after. If you’re expecting that, you will definitely be disappointed. Maybe that’s why I found the ending a little underwhelming. I’m torn on whether I felt it was fitting or if it could’ve been better. If you’re reading this and you’ve read this book, what did you think?
These points were minor, but enough to knock it down a star. For me, what I loved about this book was what it had to say about relationships and loss. Beyond that, there are plenty of things to highlight.
The characters felt REAL and I enjoyed getting to know them, flaws and all. I could relate to many of their moments, especially about being a mixed Asian person and not fitting into either side really.
I loved their friendship because it looked like real life—messy, sometimes ugly, fighting and finding forgiveness, meeting someone where they’re at, supporting them at their worst, and loving them even at a distance.
The way the author weaved in pieces of the different points this book was trying to make, over time, was brilliant. Does that make sense? You’d read some small detail and it would be a thread, nothing on its own until there’s another thread and another, tying them all together. I didn’t feel like the message was ever just being told to me, but instead shown. The grandparents were simple, but offered so much wisdom and Sadie and Sam’s inner monologues provoked a lot of thought.
Mostly, there was something this book said about how someone can have an impact on your life and how you carry a piece of them with you, that really spoke to me. I’ll explain, but maybe don’t read my explanation if you don’t want potential spoilers.
Potential Spoilers Below
There is a point where someone explains how they talk to the people they’ve lost and how they were all still in that person’s head. When I read this, I was laying down and I put my Kindle down for a moment. My best friend passed away earlier this year and so, while staring at my ceiling, I said “Hello Emily, I miss you”. I could hear her saying “hellooo” in a silly way she sometimes said it and then recalled when she said “I love you” the last time I saw her.
Later, they’re talking about acting and a scene in which the director decided this particular actor would not be in. They make the comment, “If I’ve done the work in the scenes before I die, if I’ve made a real impression, they’ll feel me in the scenes I’m not in anyway.” This line will stick with me for so long now. I wasn’t expecting the two moments to have such an impact on me, but as other “threads” came in, other Easter eggs and cameos, I definitely shed some tears.
I don’t know if this book would make everyone cry though, it could just be my own grief, always so close to the surface, bubbling up. So, don’t be afraid to pick this up!
Quotes (these could be sort of spoiler-y):
“What, after all, is a video game’s subtextual preoccupation if not the erasure of mortality?”
“And as any mixed-race person will tell you—to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.”
“We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.”
‘Orientals are rugs and furniture,’ Anna said. ‘Not people.’ [PREACH]
“You feel the body. The blood is sludgy, moving through the circulatory system at the speed of the I-10 at rush hour. The heart is not beating on its own. The brain is Slowing. Down. Increasingly, the brain is Flying. Off. Soon, you will not be you. You, like all of us, are a deictic case.”
“How much of your life has been happenstance? How much of you life has been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren’t all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?”
“If I’ve done the work in the scenes before I die, if I’ve made a real impression, they’ll feel me in the scenes I’m not in anyway.”
"And what is love, in the end? Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”
“At a certain age, there comes a time when life largely consists of having meals with old friends who are passing through town.” [Sheesh, relatable]
“She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones.” [I’m purposefully not including the rest, which would make this being notable make sense]
Words I had to look up/learned:
Akimbo
Ameliorated
Apocryphal
Auteur
Bloviating
Cicerone
Collogue
Copacetic
Dente-and
Dilettante
Echt
Emeritus
Eponymous
Ersat
Erudite
Espied
Grokking
Hirsute
Jejune
Kenophobia
Ludic
Maudlin
Mesomorphic
Misanthrope
Palimpsest
Parochial
Portmanteaus
Propitious
Raconteur
Simulacrum
Sinsemilla
Tautology
Torschlusspanik
Treacly
Turpitude
Vaudevillian
Verdigris
Verisimilitude
Viridescent
Weltschmerz
Zweisamkeit
