Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin

⭐8/10

I'm not too sure where I found out about this novel, but it was widely popular last year and about video games, so count me in!

I really liked this one. It's about video games I guess, but it's actually about friendship. It has one of my favorite tropes of close childhood friends reconnecting later in life. This was all super effective and beautifully written and made for some evocative, powerful moments. 

I liked the video game backdrop too. I thought the author made some odd choices - namely that her games clearly make no sense. She clearly knows her stuff, but this is the 90s and her games seemed incredibly complex or gimiky and like they wouldn't be fun at all. You know this is the era of like, Mario 2? But that's a minor nitpick I guess. 

I saw a bunch of complaints online that this book feels pretentious and a lot of complaints that this book is woke (what a stupid word). As for the latter point, I actually thought this book did a great job of including characters with diverse backgrounds and including modern themes without feeling preachy, so I don't really get where that was coming from. It got a little hammier in the last act, and there sure are a lot of people using they/them pronouns for the 90s, but whatever, that's not a real complaint. 

But as for this being pretentious? Gimme a break. This is not exactly a book in which you're consistently reaching for the dictionary. I thought the writing was really solid, and reminded me a lot of one of my other favorite contemporary authors, Emily St John Mandel. The author handled some emotional moments wonderfully and did an incredible job developing characters over a span of a decade or two. 

Oh, that's another thing I kept reading: it's a book about friendship, but these people are awful friends to each other. And ya! That's actually kinda true because these aren't perfect people and I loved that level of realism. They could be terrible people, but they also had plenty of moments of tenderness and love. 

So anyways, overall I thought this novel was great. Maybe not my favorite ever but I totally get the popularity and I'm glad good writers like this get recognized. I'd recommend it to video game fans, but that's totally not a prerequisite and so I'd just recommend it to anyone who likes contemporary novels about friendship.