Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

This Halt and Catch Fire odyssey through the 90s and 2000s gaming industry is equal parts heartwarming and heartbreaking.

Sadie and Sam met by chance and the trajectory of their lives changed forever. Their platonic friendship bordered on something more but both struggle to bring what that is into focus for the entire book.

As a gamer, the references to real games and creators a lá Ready Player One were easy to follow but Zevin is careful to prioritize and thread context with character development in her storytelling. I loved that the games Sadie and Sam created ran parallel to their relationship and mental and emotional states.

The way Zevin writes neurodivergent Sam was truly beautiful. I understood his triggers and blockers without being told. I understood how his childhood and friendship with Sadie influenced him and his art. Yet, Sam was deep and multifaceted.

Real talk though: Sadie infuriated me to no end in the second half. Her arc seems to putter to a stop and I don't feel she learns or grows from her mistakes, but I couldn't decide if it was out of egoism or self-preservation. She doesn't even apologize to Sam for the way she treated him after <spoiler> what happened to Marx. </spoiler> Sadie was a gaming Scarlet O'Hara, enduring to the point of selfishness in spite of how she used and hurt the people closest to her. <spoiler>Then, she had the gall to blame Sam for her disastrous relationship with Dov. Then she kept her ongoing thing with Dov, even after everything? And her perspective on trying not to look at Naomi because she reminded her of Marx? Naomi thing felt like a prop anyway.</spoiler> Pure cringe. I guess in that respect this book mirrors life--some people get lost in tragedy and let it frame the rest of their lives.

Overall, loved Sadie and Sam's complex relationship and even the ending, as spare as it was. I feel Sadie and Sam were both on their own healing journeys, even though I didn't feel like I saw their conclusion. Brave to end a book like that--beautifully minimalist but full of so much love as two fractured people try to move forward in the best way they can.

What an incredible, incredible, incredible book. As someone who’s never read this style of book before I was unsure that a story about game developers would have enough to it to engage me, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. I ended up forcing myself to slow down and savor this story because i wanted to spend as much time with Sadie and Sam as possible. They are two of my favorite characters ever, the dynamic between them and the way it evolves throughout the story is what makes this book shine and the place it leaves them in I think was exactly where they were meant to be, despite all the ups and downs they faced on the journey. I also wanted to mention the NPC chapter. It was stunning and devastating, but so beautifully written. I felt like I should be in tears, and I think I would have been if I hadn’t been too busy being engrossed in the writing, specifically the way it was switching states of consciousness at all times. This became an instant classic in my mind and a book I will remember reading forever.

1.75 stars
I don't understand the hype around this book. The writing tone is inconsistent, sometimes juvenile and not in a good way. The characters, especially Sadie were extremely unlikeable, not even in a morally gray way, but in a malicious she-wanted-to-be-chased way, often with admittance that she knew all along the opposite of what she is accusing people of. She also engaged in vile actions as well. The writing was cheesy and redundant, often illogical. For ex., excessive comparisons of real life things to being a game designer, including some aspects of motherhood and how Sadie dehumanized her own child to be able to make sense that this child is their own person by comparing her to a game character. The dialogue was clunky. The ending, after 500 pages was extremely unsatisfying and dull. The writing dragged on. It was unnecessarily long.
One thing in particular I hated was the author deliberately letting 2 years pass in the narration, moving to a different set of events after those two years, not even grand events, and then filling in the gaps of those 2 years in retrospect . It was fine the first few times, but it became super annoying very fast. The ending made it feel that all that reading was severely pointless.