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.
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