What This Book Is About
Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a hospital — he recovering from a car accident that damaged his foot, she visiting her ill sister. They bond over a Super Mario Bros. game on a shared console, and in that unlikely hour, something begins that will define both of their lives.
Years later, they reconnect by accident at a Boston train station. Both are college students now. Neither had quite stopped thinking about the other. By the time they part that afternoon, they've agreed to make a video game together. The game — Ichigo, a side-scrolling platformer — becomes a surprise hit. And then they make another game. And then another. Two decades of collaboration, argument, silence, success, failure, love, and loss, told through the games they build and what those games mean to them.
The novel is explicitly about the act of creation: what it costs, what it requires, what it does to the people who do it. Sam and Sadie are both making art and making a life — usually the same thing for creative people, which is both the gift and the problem. Their relationship is the most intimate kind — built on shared work, shared vision, shared language — and yet they can't navigate the ordinary vocabulary of what they are to each other.
Zevin uses video games as both setting and metaphor with unusual dexterity. You don't need to be a gamer to follow the story; the games the characters make are described in enough loving detail to understand them, and what they mean to the characters is always clear. But readers who grew up with games from the 1980s through the 2000s will find a layer of specific recognition layered throughout — references, aesthetics, cultural context — that adds texture without being exclusionary.
Who Should Read This
This book has found readers who have never touched a video game in their lives and readers who have spent thousands of hours in virtual worlds. Both groups tend to love it, which tells you something about how it works: it's using games to talk about something that is recognizable to anyone who has made something with someone they love and been unable to keep the making separate from the loving.
This is for you if:
- You've been part of a creative partnership and felt the specific intimacy and specific friction of that kind of relationship
- You want literary fiction that takes craft and process seriously — this is a novel about how things are made
- You're ready for a love story that refuses to be a love story in the conventional sense, where the emotional content is more complex and less resolved than genre fiction allows
- You can handle prose that is somewhat digressive and essayistic — Zevin writes beautifully and is willing to follow an idea for several pages before returning to plot
Not for readers who need momentum above all else, or who want a romance with satisfying resolution. The relationship at the center of this book is deliberately incomplete in ways that are true to how these relationships actually exist.
What Makes It Special
Zevin's prose has a quality that is rare in contemporary literary fiction: it is intellectually engaged without being cold. She thinks hard about what she's writing — about creativity, time, identity, games as art form, the ethics of artistic collaboration — and she lets the thinking show, but the intellectual content is always in service of the emotional story rather than an alternative to it.
The novel's structure, which moves through decades non-linearly and includes the games Sam and Sadie make as embedded narratives, is formally inventive without being difficult. Each of the games functions as an emotional X-ray of where the characters are at the time they make it: Ichigo reflects their early optimism and connection, later games reflect more complicated states. This is a beautiful device because games literally are built from the creative choices of the people who make them, and Zevin uses that truth literally.
Sam is the most complex protagonist in the book, and Zevin takes seriously the difficulty of his character — his pride, his capacity for cruelty when he feels wronged, his tendency to disappear into work as a substitute for vulnerability. He is not easy to like in many scenes, and that difficulty is part of the point: creative genius and emotional immaturity coexist in real people, and the book doesn't apologize for or celebrate either quality in him.
The secondary characters — particularly Marx, Sam's college roommate who becomes the business partner of their studio — add genuine warmth and texture. Marx's role in the story, both practically and emotionally, is one of the book's quiet pleasures.
The Good & The Honest
What works:
- The prose is genuinely beautiful — this is a book to read slowly enough to notice the sentences
- Sam and Sadie's relationship is among the most honest depictions of creative partnership in fiction
- The video game descriptions are rendered with loving precision — they feel like real games
- The novel earns its emotional weight through accumulation rather than manipulation
- Marx is a genuine surprise — a secondary character who becomes essential
What to know:
- The non-linear structure and digressive prose require patience — this is not a fast read
- Sam is genuinely difficult in specific sections; readers who need likable protagonists should be prepared
- The ending is emotionally precise but not narratively tidy — if you need clean closure, adjust expectations
Marx's death — sudden, violent, real-world — is one of the most structurally devastating moments in recent literary fiction. It happens without warning, which is the point. Zevin has spent the novel preparing us to lose Sam or Sadie to each other. Losing Marx instead breaks the story open in a way that neither character, nor reader, is ready for.
Sam's response to Marx's death — the way grief combines with guilt (Marx was there because of Sam and Sadie's choices), the way it further damages the relationship that was already damaged — is handled with the same refusal to comfort that the novel applies to everything. Grief here is not redemptive. It doesn't resolve the relationship problems. It adds weight to them.
The time-skip to the end, where we find Sadie playing a game Sam has made for her — a game that is an explicit apology, an explanation, and a declaration all at once — is the closest the novel comes to a romantic resolution. It's achieved through the language both characters actually have: code, design, game mechanics. The declaration is in the structure of the game rather than in dialogue, which is the most honest version of how these two people could possibly say what they mean to each other.
Whether it's enough — whether this constitutes the happy ending readers have been waiting for — is a question Zevin leaves in the reader's hands. Probably deliberately. The novel is, among other things, an argument that some relationships exist outside the grammar of conventional endings, and that the work made in their name outlasts the complications of the people who made it.
If You Liked This, Try...
- The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt — Art, loss, and a decades-long story of what we carry forward
- Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney — Relationships that resist conventional definition, told with precise psychological attention
- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles — Literary fiction with a generous heart; structurally inventive and emotionally satisfying
- Intermezzo by Sally Rooney — Two brothers navigating grief and love with the same kind of emotional precision
The Verdict: A Modern Classic
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is one of the best novels published in recent years, full stop. It will appeal to almost any serious reader who gives it the time it deserves. Read it slowly. Let Zevin's thinking work on you. This is a book worth owning and rereading.
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