Review and quotes: TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW

Title: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Book Beginnings/First Line quote:

Friday56 quote:

Summary: Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital when they are both preteens. He is there for yet another surgery on his crushed foot after an accident, she because her sister is there getting treatment for leukemia. The first thing they do is play a video game together. This chance meeting leads to over 600 hours of time spent together playing and getting to know each other. After their friendship breaks apart, they don't see each other again for seven years until they bump into each other at a train station. He is now a student at Harvard, she a student at M.I.T, majoring in computer science. Their friendship is renewed and they decide to spend a summer creating a video game together. So begins a lifetime partnership built on the framework they started as kids, based on their love of gaming and a solid friendship. Though Sam wishes for romance, Sadie assures him that true collaborators are more rare and special.

Review: The book blogging world is of two minds about this book. There are those who say they couldn't get into it because they aren't gamers and those who could get into it even though they might not be into video games. I am in the second camp. Though I have rarely played any video games, other than the very first-- Pac Man and Space Invaders-- I enjoyed this story of friendship, competition, and gaming very much. Zevin, a life-time gamer herself seemed born to write this book. She brought her own love of the format to her story in such a way that people who didn't understand all the real-life gaming references didn't feel left out. She didn't burrow into the minutia and tedium of video game creation, but rather focused on the camaraderie and the art that goes into the successful creation of each new game. She also recognized how important good producers are to the success of the product and creates Marx, a lovable and loving friend to both Sam and Sadie, to fit that role. "Zevin’s delight in her characters, their qualities, and their projects sprinkles a layer of fairy dust over the whole enterprise" (Kirkus Reviews).

Marx and Sam are both mixed-Asian heritage and some of the most interesting psychological aspects of the novel involve both of their feelings of "unbelonging." Sadie was the creative genius in the partnership but wanted little to do with the games promotions leaving that job to Sam. When the gaming world thought that Sam was the creator of their first baby, Ichigo, Sadie started to pull away thinking he was trying to usurp her efforts. This movement away from Sam didn't happen all at once but at one point it led to a chasm so wide one couldn't imagine either finding their way back to other.

It was Marx who provided the book with its title. He loved theater and acting and wanted the company they formed together to be called "Tomorrow Games" as a reference to Shakespeare's Macbeth --  “What is a game?" Marx said. "It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.” This idea of beginning again, of starting over, of putting a new quarter into the Donkey Kong machine and getting high score, of playing a new game but loving it as much as the old game forms the theme of the book.

Now to be fair to my fellow bloggers who didn't love this book or didn't think they would so they didn't read it, I didn't rate Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow as high as you would think from this review. I gave it a 4.25 rating. The middle part just went on a bit too long for me. The miscommunication between Sadie and Sam irritated me, too. I listened to the 14 hours of recording on audiobook. It dragged for me in places and I felt compelled to bump up my listening speed (1.25.) But the ending was almost perfect and I think I cried for the last one hundred pages solid. I truly appreciated the world that Zevin created for us which allowed us to take a peek at the beauty and pain of friendships through a unique lens: video games..

Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Rose City Reader. First Line Friday is hosted by Reading is My Super Power. Share the opening quote from current book.The Friday56 is hosted at Freda's Voice.  Find a quote from page 56 to share. Visit these two websites to participate. Click on links to read quotes from books other people are reading. It is a great way to make blog friends and to get suggestions for new reading material. 

 

Weighing in at 416 pages, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow qualifies for the Big Book Summer Challenge. Unbelievably, this is my third big book of the summer so far! This never happens.

-Anne