Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Have you ever read a book that, when you finished it, made you wonder if the author was so brilliant that they made you empathize with the main characters while also deeply disliking them, or if the disliking was unintentional and it wasn’t meant to make you so upset? That’s how I felt about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — particularly in the way that Sadie and Sam both felt like very plausible characters, but I wanted to throttle them both.

This is a story about friendship and relationships, set in the context of the game industry and all of its horrors, from the competitiveness to the sexism to the commercialization. Sadie and Sam’s friendship (if you believe it is actually friendship) revolves around gaming, but throughout the book they clash over their games and consistently fail to care for and empathize with each other (thus my doubt that the story represents a true friendship). If that were the entirety of the story I’d probably rate it lower, but there’s a chapter about 2/3 of the way in (the NPC chapter) that blew me away, and I was left thinking that perhaps the greatest value in this book is the evolving pain, hollowness, and grief threaded throughout.