Book: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Pages: 383
Read on: Kindle
Read in: ~5 hours
Plot Summary: Two kids meet in a hospital gaming room in 1987. One is visiting her sister, the other is recovering from a car crash. The days and months are long there. Their love of video games becomes a shared world -- of joy, escape and fierce competition. But all too soon that time is over.
When the pair spot each other eight years later in a crowded train station, they are catapulted back to that moment. The spark is immediate, and together they get to work on what they love - making games to delight, challenge and immerse players, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives. Their collaborations make them superstars.
This is the story of the perfect worlds Sadie and Sam build, the imperfect world they live in, and of everything that comes after success: Money. Fame. Duplicity. Tragedy.
Things I Liked:
1. This book is about video games- at the surface, most obvious, level. A world about which I know very little simply because I have never played any kind of a video game. Not even the basic 'Snake' that came with the most basic Nokia phones in the early 2000s. So, this world of gaming- the creative process behind it, the art of it, the science of it- seemed really interesting to me when I read the premise of this book and it made me want to learn more about this world.
The book does delve in a fair amount of detail into the creative process that goes behind creating a game. Especially, the philosophical, moral, artistic, cultural and aesthetic process that goes behind it. It does not dwell that much into the technical or political (e.g., the discrimination and derision faced by female game designers/ coders/ gamers) aspects of this world and for that I will deduct 0.5 stars from the rating, simply because these are important conversations around the whole gaming world and culture that needed to be included in a book like this.
2. At a deeper level, this is a book about human beings. Especially, young human beings, who are forming their identities, getting a grip on their ideals and learning to navigate the adult world. Sadie and Sam re-connect when they are 20 years old and college Sophomores in Boston. They build a game, which earns them a ton of money and fame. However, what they struggle to navigate are the emotional aspects of "adulting", if you will.
Sam, an orphaned, semi-disabled/ differently abled, young man, is full of complexes and insecurities. He is half Korean-half Jewish and somewhere there is massive angst stemming from not belonging to either of the two worlds. He is inexpressive, emotionally stunted and, often, very, very selfish. I am not sure if I fully liked him. I am not sure if I (as a reader) am supposed to like him. His reticence, pettiness, inability to clearly communicate anything just grated on my nerves. Maybe it was supposed to!
Sadie, raised in a wealth Beverly Hills Jewish family, also has issues of her own. She is not assertive at all, she struggles with setting boundaries and is a weird people pleaser. As in, she wants to please the a$$holes in her life! Through the course of this book, which spans 20 years since they first meet, there are multiple times when Sadie is upset about something Sam has inadvertently done but she prefers to seethe rather than share her feelings with him.
So, as you can probably tell, there comes a point when the best friends fall out. And this whole process of how they got to this point is so beautifully crafted in this book that it took my breath away! A lot of friendships, probably, die like this or, at any rate, develop large rifts/ cracks in them!
3. The writing is beautiful and there are several places in the book where you'd want to stop and think and ruminate.
4. Oh and there are some really lovely supporting characters in this book. Marx, Sam's roommate and future business partner, was my favourite! Sam's grandparents, Sadie's grandma and their colleagues Simon and Ant were also lovely.
5. This is a (kind of) coming-of-age book. It is about handling success and failure and toxic relationships, setting boundaries, dealing with grief and disability and all of that. It is messy and it is life and the book brings out all of this really beautifully!
Things I Didn't Like:
1. As mentioned above, I felt that it was a bit of a cop out that the author did not get into the discrimination and derision faced by female game designers/ coders at all! Especially, when, in this book, Sadie was the one conceptualising, coding and designing the games.
Rating: 4/5
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