⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Review – Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin!
This is not your average love story. It starts with a friendship between two kids in the children’s hospital game room. It develops into a game design partnership at university and takes them through their loves and losses, career highs and lows into adulthood. It follows the lives of Sadie and Sam who grow up wanting to create their own games while playing all the arcade and video games they could get their hands on. With the help of Sam’s friend Marx, they start building their first game, Ishigo, which launches them into the worldwide spotlight.
This was an absolutely engrossing read. Zevin has an amazing way of world-building, especially when describing video game environments (from the 90s!) in such visceral, visual sentences. I was captivated throughout the book. It feels so immersive and I could feel my fingers itching to play the games Zevin described Sadie and Sam creating.
It was heartwarming, funny, snarky, filled with nostalgic pop-culture references and tragic, heartbreaking and so emotional at the same time. While reading this, you get a real sense of how fast the innovations of the time developed, with cellphones not being prominent in the early 90s to being very accessible by the end of the novel in the late 2000s.
This is truly a love letter to the video game culture and game designers of the 90s and that tenderness and appreciation has come across incredibly well. This is a truly unique novel that will make anyone fall in love with it and our main characters. I will personally be gifting this to all the video-game lovers in my life!
I want to say a massive thank you to @Tri.Northern and @chattobooks for getting me involved in this campaign and sending me an early review copy.
Eliza Burmistre 