Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

I have… very complicated feelings about this book. It’s good, and I enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help comparing it throughout to a slightly worse version of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, as I just finished that book and they dealt with many of the same themes (two codependent people making a creative project at the dawn of an era). As Kavalier and Clay is a generational classic, I tried to push the comparisons to the side so that I could give Tomorrow3 (as it got dubbed in my texts to friends when I was too lazy to type the full title) a fair shake. Unfortunately, it still had some glaring flaws.

Be warned, there are spoilers in this review!

Let’s start with what I enjoyed. The format of the book was really good, framing each section of the book with the video game that the main characters (Sam and Sadie) were making at the time. Occasionally, there would be jumps forward in time to show how events would become reframed over the course of their careers, such as saying things like “in an interview with [some magazine, I don’t remember now] in 2017, Sam said…” and so on. I thought that was a good addition to help the themes of how memory and intervening years can affect the telling of events. At times, however, I think these gave us too much about the characters, such as telling us in one of these moments that Sam and Sadie hadn’t spoken in years at the point of a future event.

I listened on audio, and I found the narrator’s voice extremely calming and clear. There was a secondary narrator for one section, and he was good as well, but I really liked the main narrator. 

Even though there will be more ‘bad’ that I list, I did enjoy the experience of reading the book overall. I have recommended it to people already, and don’t regret that I did so before I finished it. I think it’s a good book for someone who grew up with video games and wants an engaging historical fiction book about them.

Now, time for the bad. The first is, as I said, that it’s a slightly worse version of Kavalier and Clay. Even pushing that aside, the book felt as if it could use another edit. In the first 50% of the book, we randomly got sections from Sam’s dead mother’s POV that I felt honestly didn’t add anything to the book. While we aren’t explicitly told that she’s dead before the end of those flashbacks, it’s pretty clear that she must be, and it’s sad enough that he has a dead mom. The handful of flashbacks, mostly containing things Sam didn’t even know about (and never learns about), don’t really explain anything about the book to me. I think it was meant to underscore a theme of the first generation immigrant experience, or the general tragedy of life, but it didn’t do so effectively and I think the book would’ve been better without those sections.

Later, when there is an incident of gun violence in the book, I felt the way that it was written was very ‘now’ (2022, at the time the book was released) and not very ‘2005’ (when the event takes place). Overall, the book had an air of ‘2022 writing the ‘90s and ‘00s’ rather than a normal historical fiction book, even considering the future-moments. The anachronistic moments occasionally took me out of the reading experience. 

The themes that are brought up in the book (race, gender, and disability being major ones) aren’t well enough explored for my liking and are sort of just left there in front of the reader like ‘see? I can include complex topics!’ rather than actually doing anything of particular interest with them. 

My final thoughts on Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow are that it’s a good book that could’ve used another editorial pass. Despite my seemingly negative review, I would actually recommend it to video game lovers and people who want something a little bit different.

“If you’re always aiming for perfection, you won’t make anything at all.”