tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow
According to online reviewers, the best thing about "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" is its rich character development and emotional depth, which allows readers to connect deeply with the protagonists. Conversely, some reviewers noted that the pacing can be slow at times, making it challenging to maintain engagement throughout the narrative.
Plot & Themes
What made it stick: A thirty-year friendship and creative partnership between two game designers that is also a love story that refuses to be a romance — Zevin is rigorous about the specific kind of intimacy that exists between collaborators who are also, in some way, in love, and refuses to resolve it into conventional categories.
The plot: Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a hospital, lose touch, and reconnect at a train station in 1987 when Sam recognizes Sadie playing Super Mario Bros. They begin making video games together — first Ichigo, which becomes a phenomenon, then a series of increasingly ambitious projects over three decades. Their partnership is defined by what they cannot say to each other, by their different relationships to success and failure, and by the specific friction of two people who need each other creatively and are perpetually hurting each other personally. Their friend Marx, who produces their games, is a kind of third point of their triangle.
What it’s about:
- Games as a medium for experiencing other lives — Zevin treats video games with the same seriousness she brings to the relationship; playing a game is presented as a genuine form of empathy, a way of inhabiting a perspective that is not yours
- The intimacy of collaboration — Sam and Sadie’s creative relationship is more intimate than most romantic relationships in the novel, and the book is asking what that means and whether it is enough
- Success as a solvent — the novel tracks how external recognition (fame, money, criticism) changes what the collaboration can be, and not always in the ways the characters expect
- Disability and pain as unspoken conditions — Sam’s limp and chronic pain are present throughout but rarely foregrounded; they shape his psychology and the novel’s, without defining him
- The title as an argument — the Macbeth quotation (tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / creeps in this petty pace from day to day) is about the meaninglessness of repetition; Zevin uses it as an argument for the opposite — that the daily repetition of creative work is where meaning actually lives
— Drafted from external sources; review and edit to make your own.