Gabrielle Zevin’s TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW is a book about a lot of things. There’s an exploration on how friendships change over time, how love is expressed in all different ways, unrequited and requited, how flawed people can be sometimes, I could go on. It’s about life, it’s about being human, I think ‘coming of age’ novel might be the best description but that doesn’t quite do it justice. The book is messy, heavy and convoluted and this is absolutely not a criticism – it feels intentionally so as if it captures the chaos of being young itself.
The story follows Sam and Sadie who become friends as children and collaborators in adulthood. Their friendship grows and wanes with the circumstances of life and the mistakes of youth. It doesn’t sound like much happens but these are the books that amaze me – how do you make the boring, day to day issues engaging? Subtle drama is always my preferred genre, and this book did not disappoint in that regard. There are some circumstances where, for plot reasons, the book veers into soap-opera territory, but at around 400 pages I can forgive a few of those.
There’s a pink elephant in the room that I haven’t addressed yet, and that is the video games aspect of this game. I haven’t said that this book is about video games, even though a cursory glance at the book cover and the blurb would lead you to believe it is about little else. And indeed the author pushes the video game aspect of it hard – the book is stuffed with references to video games, Sam and Sadie are video game developers, the entire book is centered around their love of video games and the making of them. Almost every character in this book is connected to a video game somehow. Interestingly, online I’ve found that people who do not play video games have found this book extremely enjoyable. The ones that do, like me, found that the references and experiences do not quite ring true. For me, this book felt a bit like what ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is to the medical profession but for video gaming. Zevin might want us to believe that Sam and Sadie live and breathe video games, and that may have been more believable if she had eased up on the references a bit more.
But overall, if you can ignore the video game references – which feel like icing on a cake, and in this case, way too much icing – the story itself is engaging and enjoyable for fans of coming of age drama. It is such a shame that its setting distracts from the novel so much.
Review by Tiffany Yuan
