Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

This is the story of Sam and Sadie. It’s not a romance, but it is about love.

When Sam catches sight of Sadie at a crowded train station one morning he is catapulted straight back to childhood, and the hours they spent immersed in playing games.

Their spark is instantly reignited and sets off a creative collaboration that will make them superstars. It is the 90s, and anything is possible.

What comes next is a decades-long tale of friendship and rivalry, fame and art, betrayal and tragedy, perfect worlds and imperfect ones. And, above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.

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I’ve jumped on the bandwagon somewhat with this one, but I have to admit that I’ve been intrigued by it for some time, and I do love that cover.  And sometimes the hype is justified.  I really enjoyed this novel and quickly became engrossed in the lives of Sadie and Sam. 

Sadie and Sam meet when they’re around 12 years old.  Sam is in hospital following a car accident, and Sadie is spending a lot of time there while her sister is treated for cancer.  The two bond over a Super Mario game in the hospital, and very quickly become the best of friends, at least partly as neither has other friends to whom they can turn.  They fall out, but reconnect some six years later after a chance meeting in a crowded train station.  Their friendship re-established, the two take their love of gaming and decide to make their own game – something that will turn into a career for them both.

I adored both of these characters, even though there were times when I could happily have slapped either one – or both – of them.  Sadie has always been intelligent, but in a way that I think makes her somewhat unapproachable at school and beyond, and Sam seems to be the first person she bonds with outside of her family.  I felt a great deal of sympathy for Sadie, particularly as her relationship with an older man – her professor, no less – takes a strange turn.  Through Sadie, Zevin explores the prejudice against women studying programming and those that go on to make a career out of it, particularly in the 90s when Sadie and Sam are starting out.  The challenges she faces are infuriating although not at all surprising, and I hope that this is something that has shifted in the industry as Zevin suggests later in the novel.

Sam’s time in hospital is due to a car accident that killed his mother and resulted in him being brought up by his grandparents.  His foot was badly injured in the accident, requiring many rounds of surgery to mend it although it’s never the same.  This early experience has made Sam a quiet, introverted, and socially awkward individual, and Sadie is the first person he speaks to following the accident.  He carries these traits throughout his life, becoming stoic as he grows up and reluctant to share emotion, never sharing his discomfort with those around him even though they’d be more than happy to help and support him if he did.  Sam and Sadie don’t seem like an obvious pairing, and yet their shared love of gaming becomes an unbreakable bond, although one that will be tested many times.   

As soon as I started reading this novel, I was utterly swept away in the lives of these two protagonists.  I started reading, and before I knew it, I was a quarter of the way through – no small thing for a novel that’s just short of 500 pages.  While not always plain sailing, these two have an incredibly special friendship and know each other completely.  Of course, there are ups and downs along the way.  They fall out and argue, they snap at each other, they make assumptions, they make up, or at least pretend to.  And I was with them every step of the way.  I got angry with one or the other of them at times, I laughed, I worried, but more than anything, I wanted them both to be ok and to keep that friendship going as I think that what they have is quite rare.

There is a lot about gaming in the novel – both the playing of various games as well as some of the finer details of developing one.  I describe myself as a casual gamer, and found this insight into the process absolutely fascinating, but I don’t think that you need to be a gamer at all to enjoy the novel.  The detail is necessary to illustrate the difficulty of their work and the pressure they find themselves under to make a game that stands out in an increasingly crowded market.  This detail doesn’t overwhelm the novel, and I think it’s pitched at the right level to enable non-gamers to understand it without patronising those who are more familiar with these concepts. 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is very much a character-driven novel as we see Sadie and Sam grow up (eventually) and go through the inevitable ups and downs that life throws at us.  While I love them both, they can be a little frustrating at times, particularly at how they choose to interpret each other’s actions and motives, which can lead to some misunderstandings along the way.  This is a novel that puts both the reader and its characters through the wringer, emotionally speaking.  It’s brilliant and I loved it, and I challenge anyone not to fall at least a little bit in love with the two protagonists, and those who come to be swept along for the journey they find themselves on.  Highly recommended, whether you’re into gaming or not.