Book Review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Title & Author: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Genre: Fiction
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.5 / 5) [my book rating scale]
Summary: The book follows two friends over the course of 30 years through the successes and hardships they experience while creating a video game company together. The reader follows the development of their relationship with each other, their relationship with others, and the successes and failures of their creations while exploring themes of friendship, platonic love, disability, identity, and more.
Review: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is one of those books that was at the top of every list when it came out. I saw this book at the front of every bookstore and mentioned on every book list and couldn’t wait to find out what the hype was about. I sat with my FOMO for a bit before picking it up, and when I did . . . I was kind of disappointed.
Let’s start off with why I like the book. I love that the plot and the themes are different and not mainstream. I don’t know much about video games and the gaming world, and I think Gabrielle Zevin did an amazing job making the world of video game creation and production accessible and enjoyable. She also incorporated themes that we don’t often see in popular books – themes of friendship, platonic love, disability/illness, depression, and some darker ones that I won’t list so as not to spoil anything (but I do suggest looking up trigger warnings prior to reading the book, if that’s something you are worried about). For those reasons, I wanted to love this book so much, but there are a couple reasons why I didn’t.
I know I just went on about how much I loved the variety of themes, and I do, but I also think there may have been too many. In my opinion, we either needed a longer book or fewer motifs in order to delve into all of them properly. The book spans a long period of time, so it makes sense that certain topics come and go as we move through various periods of time, but I felt like that did some of the topics a disservice. I loved how the entirety of the book, encompassing multiple periods of time, was used to flesh out some of the larger, overarching themes like friendship. I would have liked if that had also been done with some of the smaller, yet heavier themes so that the reader could have more time to digest them. Instead, I felt like the story was punctuated by intermittent, darker topics that made me feel like I didn’t have enough time to process them before we moved on to the next heavy thing. To me, that made the treatment of the darker themes feel more like trauma dumping than making them part of the story as a whole.
I also didn’t love or really understand either of our two main characters. It’s one thing to disagree with a character’s choices and another to not understand why they made their choices. Loving and relating to characters is not part of my criteria for a five star book, but understanding characters’ motivations and morals and the reasoning behind why they do what they do, is. On top of not being able to relate to either of the characters, I didn’t feel like there was much character development with either of them. Since I didn’t feel like I had a full picture of who the characters’ are and what their motivations are, I never really understood their actions (or lack of action). This is a bit challenging to elaborate on without potentially spoiling the book, but hopefully you get what I mean. Basically, miscommunication is not my favorite trope, but I am more likely to get over it if there is a reason for it.
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