Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Couldn’t put it down.

Just a fantastic read. Sad it ended.

I finished this book in 3 days. I don’t think i’ve been this engaged with a book since I was young - I couldn’t recommend anything more.

Loved this book but the ending 🫤

I don’t know what I read. Book didn’t really have a point and most characters were deeply unlikeable.

I fell in love with the characters. Excellent from start to finish. Best book I have read in a while.

Leaves you wishing it never ended. A beautifully written story about friendship, differences and understanding.

Gabrielle Zevin left no stone unturned, bandage in-place, or social trope in her inventory while delivering an electric novel. Books like this are as complete a dialogue about life and all of its pain, joy, and the mess in-between. Like a reflection in an indigo lake, her characters fascination with being gamers, mirrors why some of us are readers. Though we see events from many stages of life, it’s Zevin’s exploration of the uncertainty and anxiety of youth that serves as a driving theme in the story. Specifically, the almost violent point where the idealized perceptions of youth meet the compromising reality and judgements of the world. On a deeper level we see how the singular passion of youth occasionally manifests as creative genius. For many there is a treasure chest of topics to enjoy in the video gaming world she builds for us. Including the highs, lows, and intricacies of the gamer’s experience. I am particularly enthralled by Zevin’s leveraging video games as a larger representation of every fascinating and depressing thing about the real world. We are challenged to weigh the pros and cons between the two “realities” and how we face life in each. Zevin’s voice and characterizations are refreshing and hard to shake. Her style crafts the kind of story that puts the joy in reading. It’s the book you wish could write and our glad to have read. Her masterful use of the omnipotent perspective gives us characters with real depth and dynamic qualities. The themes blend perfectly together pulling us from one revelation to another. As Zevin clearly states this book is a love song in many respects. A love song to artists and makers as well as the creative process. For me it was a reminder that life is for living, here and now. That if we are present and fully engaged we will see the magnificence of being and, when the end comes, exude the gratefulness that it happened at all.

The story was well-conceived, and shared with the reader many of the dimensions of the gaming, and the creative, experience. It did so honestly, and paralleled Fikry’s style of rich and complicated people intersecting and drifting apart. It was easy to locate oneself in the text. Those intersections where richly-imagined characters met were the primary focus of the writing, and threw sparks while they invited the sharing of paths. The novel blurred the boundaries between the lived and the imagined, and preferred neither. This was a tale worth telling.

This felt like a saga to me - like, there’s no big rising action to a big payout in the end. It’s more little stories cobbled together over years and stays pretty flat. Maybe you’re into that sort of thing. It’s just not something I enjoy. Then, add to that, characters that aren’t really likeable and an oddly-rushed ending, and I was just glad it was over. I grew up in this time period and expected to love it because it was about video games, but I guess I was expecting something more like Ready Player One. Oh well.