Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
by Gabrielle Zevin
published by Penguin Random House
2022
The pen friend who recommended this to me was so right – and so good – to encourage me to read this!
Sadie is visiting her sister in a hospital when she meets Sam after his life-changing accident. The fact that he speaks with her (and almost no one else) leads to her return, and then to a friendship that spans decades – and the creation of multiple immersive video games reflecting their joint and separate (and often disparate) visions. Estrangement, reconnection, deep friendship, creative collaboration, fundamentally knowing each other at the geekiest levels, affection, exploitation, and the fraught business of being opposite sex business partners in the world of video gaming make for an engaging, emotionally developed story.
Zevin creates a window in time when real innovation in video games was possible, when leaving MIT to create a game as one’s life’s work felt right, when friends made in youth become lifelong, when life happens to members of a group at different rates, and when creative credit and blame were never evenly distributed.
The collaborative elements, design, and friend-strife all feel compelling. It is hard to dream and create with other people! Even people you know well. ESPECIALLY people you know well.
This is an adventure story, a tech story, several relationship stories, a tribute to geek culture at its university-spawned-finest, and the story of several entwined lives running on slightly-misaligned-yet-deeply-caring tracks. I was deeply engaged throughout.