Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

 

Reviewed by Kristin

Sam and Sadie met in a children’s hospital in California. Sam was a patient; Sadie wasn’t. Sadie was just there to visit her sister Alice, who had the fortunate misfortune of having childhood cancer, but a cancer that was almost always curable. Sam had been in a horrendous car accident which crushed his foot and thus he required many surgeries to try to fix it. Also, Sam wasn’t talking. Until Sadie.

Sam and Sadie spend hundreds of hours playing video games together in the game room of the hospital. Sam begins to recover, although his foot will never be the same as before the accident. Sam and Sadie become the best of friends, until they aren’t.

Several years later, Sam is a junior at Harvard when he runs into Sadie in Boston. She is a student at MIT learning how to program video games. The two begin a collaboration which will make them famous as developers of the worldwide sensation Ichigo. The title character is a young Japanese child swept out to sea who must make their way back to land and their family through a series of challenges and decision-making.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow takes Sam and Sadie from childhood to adulthood with all the expected fumbling and pains along the way. Sam has to deal with an ongoing disability due to the damage his foot sustained in that long ago accident, as well as his social awkwardness. He is half-Korean, half-Jewish, raised by his mother’s Korean parents. Sadie has grown up in privileged circumstances in her Jewish household. She is also one of a scarce handful of women in her advanced programming classes. Both are obviously brilliant (having landed at Harvard and MIT respectively) and care deeply for one another.

Gabrielle Zevin’s writing is compulsively readable, and I could barely pause while reading. She builds three-dimensional characters beautifully, making me want to immerse myself in their world just a little bit longer. Drawing from mythology and the woodblock print “The Great Wave at Kanagawa”, the game Ichigo reflects many aspects of Japanese culture. Even looking at the cover of this book, you can see the iconic waves drawn by Kokusai in 1829. Add in the video game style lettering with multiple trailing shadows, and I find this to be a cover worthy of the book within.

As soon as I finished this title, I began another of Zevin’s works: All These Things I’ve Done. This one is more of a young adult story and the first of a trilogy, but I am enjoying it as well. Zevin has written several other well-known novels including Elsewhere and The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. By discovering this author, I definitely have added quite a few more books to my wishlist.