Mañana, y mañana, y mañana

Just a few pages before the end there’s what I think is an exquisitely meta moment: Sadie recognized the look in Destiny’s eyes. She knew what it was to be ravenous with ambition but to have your reach exceed your grasp. I’m 99% sure this is Zevin winking at the reader. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is tremendously ambitious, and not entirely successful, and Zevin is clearly self-aware enough to know this, while also knowing that her aspirations make the world a better place.

Imperfect, but so is life, and despite the gaming themes this is entirely a book about the oh-so-messy real world. A stunningly perceptive and mature one. I did not always like the characters, but I loved them. They’re complex, troubled, inconsistently kind one moment and assholes the next. Their (lack of) communication skills had me gritting my teeth and sending exasperated late-night emails to a friend: why oh why are we humans like this? Zevin wants us to do better, but I think she also recognizes that we can’t. Her insights on cognition and mind are poignant.

Please keep overreaching. That goes for Zevin and also all of us. I want to do better. I will fail, fail again, then—until the Game Over point—pick myself back up and learn and carry on.

This is the first book in a while that I've had trouble putting down, it kept me reading later than I intended more than once. It's a complex, touching story about friendship and the value of play, which spans several decades. During that time Sam and Sadie meet, have quarrels, make up again, quarrel again, fall in love with other people, and make video games both together and separately.

It's set in the world of video game development so knowing some of those terms probably helps a little but I don't think it's really necessary; it's more about creating art together than the games themselves. (The game making is a little simplified, and as someone who works in the game industry I found it a little unbelievable in places - making an MMO with the staff they appeared to have? No way.) But waving those beside in suspension of disbelief, I doubt they'd bother anyone who doesn't actually make games for a living.

Really the book is about friendship, and flawed, complex characters, and art, and loss, and being human. It's refreshing to read an entire book about a couple that is about friendship rather than romance. It was sweet, and touching, and thought-provoking, and also occasionally annoying when the characters are clearly being idiots, but they're so well written that at least you can understand why they're being idiots. I would highly recommend this book.

Trigger warnings: there are a couple of violent deaths mentioned, and there's non-graphic description of an inappropriate teacher-student relationship with non-consensual bondage elements. These are not dwelled on any more than needed for the story's purposes, but are unavoidable elements of the plot.