This is my favorite book I’ve read thus far in 2023. I am not a literary critic, so I’ll just keep this to a loose plot summary and what I think makes this novel great.

Quick Synopsis: Two college students resume their friendship after an acrimonious friend breakup in their early years. We watch this partnership wax, wane, and evolve as they develop video games together.

What makes Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow great? (light spoilers follow)

• Whereas most novels of this type center on a love story, this one centers on friendship, and does it so well that it actually feels more satisfying than most romantic arcs.
• The relationships, especially the core one between Sam and Sadie, feel authentic. In particular, I think Zevin deftly shifted the relationships as Sam and Sadie aged, with both characters maturing but also calcifying in small, realistic ways.
• Marx Watanabe, as the third (and at times, second) wheel was perfect. The Tamer of Horses. A perfect foil for Sam and Sadie, both narratively and in the narrative itself.
• On relationships, she gets one fundamental truth right: if we actually communicated the things we felt, we’d probably be better off. And sometimes that communication can happen without it being explicitly verbal. (Thinking mostly of Sam on 210: “Tell me I don’t know you, Sam thought. Tell me I don’t know you when I could draw both sides of this hand, your hand, from memory.”
• Other fundamental truths, pt. 1, courtesy of Marx: “What is a game? It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The ideas that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.” (to which Sadie gives a sarcastic reply). This one is important though–because it gives the title, and Zevin nails it. I know very little Shakespeare, but this reference had me wanting to read some of it for the first time in my life.
• Zevin uses her knowledge of videogames to add texture to the narrative and her characters, not to show off. She does this while also displaying a deep knowledge of the subject, which I think is a tough tightrope to walk (cf. Ready Player One).
• Other fundamental truths pt 2: “We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen…Sometimes, it felt as if you…could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. You would end up a different version of yourself, in some other town. But it wouldn’t be strange like Wonderland, not at all, Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way. You would feel relief, because you had always wondered what that other life would have looked like. And there you were.” (142)
• The ending is satisfying and earned.

Highly recommended. So good that it has me perusing Zevin’s back-catalogue to see what I’ll read of hers next.