Some books resist summary because the thing that makes them extraordinary is not the plot but the accumulation of it — the way thirty years of a relationship builds until the weight of it is almost physical. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is that kind of book. I can tell you what happens in it, but I cannot tell you what it feels like to read it, except that it feels true in the way that very few novels manage.
Sam and Sadie
They meet as children in a hospital game room, bond over video games, and then lose each other for years. When they find each other again as Harvard students, it happens the way real recognition happens — suddenly and then all at once — and they begin making games together. Their first collaboration, Ichigo, becomes a phenomenon. What follows is three decades of making things: some brilliant, some failed, all significant to the story of who they are to each other.
Zevin is not writing a love story in any conventional sense, even though love is everywhere in this book. Sam and Sadie’s relationship is one of the most complex I’ve encountered in fiction — creative partnership, deep friendship, something that might be more and might be less than romance depending on which moment you’re watching, shaped by misunderstandings that span years and by the specific difficulty of loving someone whose talent equals and sometimes exceeds your own.
Video Games as a Lens on Everything
The video game industry provides the book’s texture, and Zevin’s research is evident and unobtrusive. The games Sam and Sadie make are described with enough specificity that they feel real — I genuinely wanted to play Ichigo — and the creative process, including its frustrations and compromises and occasional magic, is rendered with honesty. But games are also a metaphor the book uses deliberately: for the lives we imagine, for second chances, for the question of what it means to start over.
What This Book Does to You
There are passages in this novel that I read twice, then put the book down and sat with. Zevin writes about grief, creative failure, and the specific pain of loving someone who cannot receive what you’re offering with a precision that doesn’t announce itself. The book is also very funny in places, and it earns the funny because of how seriously it takes everything else.
Why YA Readers Will Love This
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow will appeal to readers who cut their teeth on YA and are ready for a novel that takes the same emotional seriousness and applies it to adult life — not adult life as drama or romance but as the slow accumulation of choices. Sam and Sadie’s story begins when they are children, and the book never loses the shape of young people finding each other even as they age.
For readers who grew up playing video games, there’s also the particular pleasure of seeing the thing you loved treated as serious art. Zevin never condescends to games or the people who make and love them, and that respect is part of what makes the novel feel generous. This is the rare adult literary novel that YA readers will finish feeling seen rather than excluded.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow about? Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a hospital game room, bond over video games, lose each other for years, and find each other again as Harvard students — then spend three decades making games together. ‘Their first collaboration, Ichigo, becomes a phenomenon.’ Zevin is ’not writing a love story in any conventional sense, even though love is everywhere in this book’ — Sam and Sadie’s relationship is ‘one of the most complex in fiction — creative partnership, deep friendship, something that might be more or less than romance.’
What awards did Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow receive? The novel was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist in 2023 and won the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction in 2022, representing recognition from both the literary establishment and the broad reading public. The review calls it a book that ‘feels true in the way that very few novels manage.’
How does Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow use video games as subject matter? The review credits Zevin with describing the games Sam and Sadie make ‘with enough specificity that they feel real — I genuinely wanted to play Ichigo.’ The creative process, ‘including its frustrations and compromises and occasional magic, is rendered with honesty.’ But games are also ‘a metaphor the book uses deliberately: for the lives we imagine, for second chances, for the question of what it means to start over.’
What does Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow do emotionally to its reader? ‘There are passages in this novel that I read twice, then put the book down and sat with.’ Zevin ‘writes about grief, creative failure, and the specific pain of loving someone who cannot receive what you’re offering with a precision that doesn’t announce itself.’ The book ‘is also very funny in places, and it earns the funny because of how seriously it takes everything else.’
Why does Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow appeal to readers from a YA background? The review says the novel ‘appeals to readers who cut their teeth on YA and are ready for a novel that takes the same emotional seriousness and applies it to adult life — not adult life as drama or romance but as the slow accumulation of choices.’ Sam and Sadie’s story ‘begins when they are children, and the book never loses the shape of young people finding each other even as they age.’ Zevin ’never condescends to games or the people who love them.’
Further Reading from Authoritative Sources
- Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — Wikipedia’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow article provides publication details and award history that helps readers understand the novel’s literary recognition and cultural impact.
- Gabrielle Zevin — Wikipedia’s Gabrielle Zevin article provides biographical and bibliographical context for the author, helping readers understand Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow within her broader writing career.
