Book 6: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Man, this book. I started reading it about a week ago, and it's the sort of novel where I read the first section, about the first fifty pages or so, and I had to stop there and pause for the night because I could already tell it was going to wreck me. 

It's the story of two people from LA who became friends as children playing video games together in the eighties, and then find each other again as college students in a T station in Cambridge in the nineties, and live a life together and around each other and video games for the next twenty or so years. It's a book that has a lived-in quality of time and place; they live in Cambridge and Boston about five years before I was there, but it still has the feeling of being exactly right and I felt transported into my own memories. But the sections of the novel set in places I don't know at all well (K-Town in LA, Tokyo, a small video game company in the early 2000s) feel just as specific and devastating, and it's not a book that derives its power from the familiar references of either a location or of multiple video games. 

I read this book suspecting that it would be sadder than most of the books I choose to read are, and it is, but the sadness is earned and balanced in a way that these stories aren't often. Sam and Sadie aren't perfect characters by any stretch of the imagination; they both do and say and feel things that are deeply hurtful and pigheaded and occasionally awful and borderline unforgivable, but there's a thruline of truth and a heart to it all that makes me care about them and their lives and the games they create together. The author has such a light touch with narration - we see the story through multiple POVs, and it's always a story that's being told from a future that is waiting on the early years, but it's so beautifully done, even when where the story is going occasionally made me want to put the book done just so I could stop the next page from being true. I don't want to say more about it because I was glad to have gone in with as little knowledge as I did, but it fucked me up and made me think about art and friendship and storytelling and memory and starting over, and the last line made me spontaneously burst into tears, and if that's not a rec then I don't know what is. 

Grade: A