Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin – Book
From a Google Image Search – Finger Guns
You know the story. Boy meets girl. Girl and boy spend time together, grow up together. It’s a love story – no, not Romeo and Juliet, not that kind of love story, It’s complicated.
In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, Sam Mazur and Sadie Green meet at a hospital. Sam has already experienced two traumas that would mess up anyone’s mind. Sadie has a family member in the hospital so has a fair bit of trauma in her life also. Her sister had cancer, but it has responded to treatment and Alice is there for more routine reasons. Sadie is getting ready for her Bat Mitzvah. Sam is tuned into his own grief. He lost his mother in a car accident and crushed a foot in the same car accident. Sam and his mother had moved from New York City to Los Angeles after a bizarre accident in that city seemed like a warning of danger. Moving obviously didn’t work. Sadie only spends time with Sam reluctantly at first, but they become close friends for a while. When Sam learns that Sadie is counting her time with him as community service for her Bat Mitzvah he is hurt and angry. They lead separate lives until Sam runs into Sadie at a train station.
What Sam and Sadie have in common is gaming. Sam’s Korean grandfather owns a pizza shop with a Donkey Kong machine he hoped would attract customers. Sam had permission to play as much as he wished. Since Sadie kept getting kicked out of her sister’s hospital room, Sam and Sadie played computer games, passing Sam’s laptop back and forth.
This may not be a conventional love story and it is not, despite the title, a literary novel. It is however a great gamer story and there is love and betrayal, and anger, and possibly undeserved blame. There are relationships, there is the passage of time, and there is more trauma.
My own gaming experiences are limited to the maligned “shooters” which Sadie and Sam find unartistic and antisocial. The games I played were Pac Man, Snood, and Space Invaders, shooters all. Sadie’s favorite game was Oregon Trail. In college she had as her professor Dov, a young Israeli game designer who had created and successfully marketed a popular game.
Sadie and Sam eventually create a game called Ichigo – a game with a child lost at sea who must be rescued. The game has beautiful graphics and becomes iconic. Sam’s college roommate Marx Wantanabe, is a wealthy guy with amazing social skills. Marx provides upfront money and resources for Sadie and Sam while they code and look for an engine that will drive the graphic results Sadie pictures in her mind. Marx and Sadie share a love of art and literature, especially Asian art and Shakespeare. These gamers are all very young, they drop out of college for a semester to create Ichigo. By the time they are out of their twenties, they are financially successful which seems to affect their lives very little. Love and friendship are far more difficult to maneuver through though.
You can enjoy this novel as a story. The characters are immersive. Or you can enjoy this book as a blueprint to reach gamer stardom. It’s a coming-of-age-story with a twist. It’s also a success story. I am still waiting for eye surgery, so I am still reading on Audible which I am getting used to. It doesn’t put me to sleep anymore. Although I am too old to be the intended audience for this book, I still enjoyed it. We all have a bit of the entrepreneur in us along with a taste for romance. For me the relationships seemed more like they were mapped out by a game creator than offering the personal involvement with love that readers can sometimes experience. There was always a distance between even the characters who did get intimately involved. Not my favorite book ever, but I looked forward to listening each time I got the chance.
