about is collaboration and what it asks of people and what it takes from them. Sam and Sadie are both brilliant at making games and they are most alive when they are working together and the relationship between those two things is what the book is really exploring. The creativity is not a backdrop to the emotional story. It is the emotional story. What they make together is how they love each other and that means that the work can also be where they hurt each other most badly and Zevin is honest about how that works without ever being cruel about it.
I want to say something about Sadie because i think she is the more interesting of the two main characters and i have seen her discussed less than Sam in most of the coverage i have read. Sadie is trying to be taken seriously in a field that does not take women seriously without making her whole identity about that struggle and Zevin handles this with a lot of care. Sadie is competitive and sometimes difficult and occasionally wrong about things and also enormously talented and the book never reduces her to a symbol of anything. She is just a person trying to do the thing she is best at in a world that keeps putting conditions on whether she is allowed to do it. I found her more relatable than Sam which surprised me and i think says something about how specifically Zevin drew her.
Sam has a disability that affects his foot and the way Zevin writes about this is one of the things i admired most about the book. It is always present. It shapes how he moves through the world and how he thinks about his body and what he is capable of. It is not inspirational and it is not a metaphor. It is just a fact about his life that has consequences and costs and Zevin treats it with the same specificity she brings to everything else.
Marx is the third major character and he is in some ways the warmest thing in the book. He is Sam's college roommate and he becomes important to both of them in different ways and his presence in the story gives you a version of uncomplicated affection that the Sam and Sadie relationship is too complicated to provide. Something happens to Marx in the second half of the book that i knew was coming because someone had accidentally told me and i was still not prepared for it. I actually put the book down for a few minutes after a certain chapter. That is the measure of how well Zevin had made me care about someone who is not even the central character.
Book Summary
Sam and Sadie meet as kids in a hospital and bond over video games. They lose touch. They find each other again at university in Cambridge Massachusetts and start making games together and become very successful very quickly. The book follows their friendship and creative partnership across thirty years from the early nineties to the late two thousands and it is about what it costs to make things with someone and what happens to two people when the work they share is also where they are most alive. It spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list and was named one of the 100 best books of the 21st century by the Times in 2024.
What I Liked
The friendship between Sam and Sadie is one of the best things i have read in contemporary fiction and i want to say that upfront because it is easy to describe this book as a love story and that description is not quite right. It is something more specific and more interesting than a love story. Sam and Sadie are not lovers for most of the book. They are something that does not have a clean name.
What Could Be Better
The book is nearly 400 pages and it earns most of them but there is a section in the middle involving a third character named Marx who becomes important to both Sam and Sadie and i think Zevin rushes through some of what should be the most emotionally significant parts of his arc.
I was fine with it but i understand why some people found it slower.
Context Behind the Book
Gabrielle Zevin was born in New York in 1977 and lives in Los Angeles. She has written ten novels and her books have been translated into over forty languages. Before Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow her best known book was The Storied Life of A J Fikry which was a quietly beloved novel about a bookshop owner and won several awards. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is something larger than anything she had written before and the scale of its success surprised even people who had followed her career closely. A TV adaptation is in development at Paramount.
