Last save point: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

It’s the late 1980s, and pre-teens Sam and Sadie meet in a Los Angeles hospital. Sam is recovering from a horrific car accident that killed his mother and smashed up his foot, leaving him permanently disabled, while Sadie is visiting her older sister. Sam and Sadie bond over playing computer games, so when they reunite as young adults, it’s not surprising that they end up designing games together. However, their partnership is not always an easy one. Half-Korean, half-Jewish Sam – who’s reminiscent of a softer version of the traumatised Theo in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch – is secretive, struggling with the chronic pain caused by his injury and the way it’s alienated him from his own body. Sadie is frustrated when Sam is given primary credit for their collaborations; the world assumes that as a female programmer, she must be the sidekick. Gabrielle Zevin handles the duo’s conflicts beautifully, never casting one as the wronged victim and one as the permanent aggressor. They also have recurring, complex disagreements about how far ‘making art’ conflicts with the desire to reach a larger audience, which Zevin explores thoughtfully and intelligently.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a smash hit. I absolutely loved this novel. Zevin somehow manages to port everything that’s great about YA into adult fiction, and it works so well. It focuses on work and friendship rather than romance, which I adored. Sam and Sadie have a complicated history but Zevin ultimately puts their professional and platonic bond front and centre, which is so refreshing. The material on gaming is also handled very cleverly. I rarely play computer games but love reading about them, so I’m somewhere in the middle of the scope of this book’s audience. But this feels like it would be accessible and engaging even to somebody who has no interest in games at all. Zevin focuses on games as a form of storytelling, rather than getting bogged down in the nuts and bolts of programming. She invents wonderful fictional games that demonstrate how the format is used to tell stories that wouldn’t work in more traditional genres, ranging from an Animal Crossing style farming game to a hunt for the murderer of Christopher Marlowe in Elizabethan England. Ultimately, Zevin uses games like so many other authors have used music or visual art – to talk about the challenges and joys of creating.

If this wasn’t enough, Zevin’s writing is so smart and moving. It’s difficult to strike the right balance with recurring motifs in fiction; it’s easy to lay them on too thick or make them too subtle. Zevin handles the themes that echo throughout this novel so well, letting the reader do some work without making them work too hard. One haunting image is the series of gates that Sadie walks through at a Shinto shrine in Japan, helping her understand after a professional failure that there’s always another gate ahead. This returns at an even harder time in Sadie’s life through the German phrase ‘Torschlusspanik’, ‘gate-shut panic… It’s the fear that time is running out and you’re going to miss an opportunity. Literally, the gate is closing, and you’ll never get in.’ However, this also speaks to a wider theme of the novel; the tension between always being able to start again, like having infinite lives in a video game, and running up against true end points. Zevin somehow makes this story both incredibly hopeful and incredibly poignant at the same time, reflecting the title – which references both Macbeth’s nihilistic ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’ speech and a sense of infinite possibility. Too much time when you have nothing to live for, not enough when you do.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is out in the UK on 14th July. Pre-order it now!

I received a free proof copy of this novel from the publisher for review.

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