Bookmarks asked for a review based on some specific questions:
1. What did you like about the sample?
2. What did you dislike about the sample?
3. Imagine you were tasked with pitching Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow to a friend. How would you describe it, in one sentence?
4. What themes did you feel were the most prominant / interesting in the sample? E.g. gaming, friendship, identity / culture, love, nostalgia...
5. What were your favourite moments / did anything stand out?

First Impressions:
The first thing to note is that the Netgalley tool really didn't work for me. It failed to send the book to my kindle app (though without error message) and the Netgalley app itself was borderline unusable because its scrolling across pages was awful. You'd try to scroll down to read the end of a page more easily and the app would jump 2 or 3 pages at once. I almost gave up after the 3rd attempt to get Page 3 to stay put and let me read it.

First impression of the book is that it's overwrritten. The language is dense, static and keeps getting in the way of the story, like the crowd that Sam has to walk through in the opening chapter. It also tries to load far too many ideas into too few pages. By page 6 we know that Sam will eventually go through several changes of name but at this point is still just Sam. He's small, not good looking and wears a ridiculous coat several sizes too big for him. When you boil this and the name change thing down, it makes him sound like a rip off of Douglas Adams' Svlad Cjelli.

We also know that he's come from a humble public school background via the West Coast "smart kid scene" to Harvard and has a lingering obsession with Sadie Green, who may or may not have ever noticed his interest. There's just loads of detail packed into these pages that could easily be revealed much later in the story. It feels a bit as if the author wrote the backstory, cut it off to drop us in in media res, and then had a crisis of confidence and crammed a whole load of backstory back in.

There are also details that don't work: the story starts in 1995 but references Chai tea and Kombucha. Maybe they were prevalent in Cambridge, Mass. as long ago as 1995, but they're much more recent trends in the UK and it doesn't ring true. Likewise "digitalization" and the information superhighway - these didn't really start to happen until later - Amazon and Yahoo were less than a year old in 1995 and Google was three years away.

So far (on page 14) there's *just* enough to keep me battling with the NetGalley UX to keep reading. But only just.

Full Feedback

1. So... two days later, I've finished the book and I really enjoyed it. (I was expecting a sample, but it was a whole 395 page novel which I read in just over 2 days - initially out of a sense of duty but from about 50-60 pages in because I wanted to know what happened).

It's accessible, readable (once it gets going), has some interesting themes, is cleverly structured in the way that themes and images recur but also in how the games in the book mirror the themes and events in the "real world" and the narrative itself turns around the game "Both Sides" so that the second half reflects and inverts some of the events of the first half. The central characters, with a couple of gripes, were strong, well-drawn and believable, and were definitely characters you wanted to spend more time with.

2. What didn't I like. These are relatively small points once you get past the opening - but if there's still time to edit it, they're worth considering.
- The opening is overdone - the prose is dense, there's a lot of backstory packed in, and overall it comes in as trying too hard. The first scene in the station could be pared back quite a bit and just used to get you into the story, with much more left unsaid and to be uncovered or explained later. The book starts to grab you once you meet Sam and Sadie in the hospital so get to that faster. All you really need to know from the first scene is that two former friends have made a tentative reconnection.
- Detail of timings of things. The book has clearly been well-researched in terms of what was available when, but as someone who lived through the same time period, there's quite a lot that doesn't ring true about how characters react to different things. I'm not sure Magic Eye was new or exciting enough in '95 to bring a subway station to a halt. Having email in the mid 1990s or Nintendo in the mid 1980s - let alone an actual laptop, however large - was new, unusual and pretty cool. But Sam and Sadie's reactions are far too normalised. It would be worth checking back on adoption figures for the new technologies that are mentioned and how people reacted to them and making sure that that's correctly positioned

- Authorial voice. The book is (mostly) written in a 3rd person omniscient style with a non-intrusive narrator that just describes what is happening and occasionally drops in a reference to a future or past event that we've not yet read about. And that works well. But there are two or three places where the authorial voice drops in a factoid of contextual information - e.g. the comment about how the area of the LA office would change over time - that has a different tone and feel and breaks the spell a bit. You can do that if you do it all the time (per, say, Douglas Adams), but not if it's sudden and unexpected

- Foreshadowing. There's a good amount of foreshadowing in the book but it can be a bit heavy handed. It's very easy to spot Chekhov's gun being put on the wall, and the payoff isn't as effective. It's also a little inconsistent. Sadie's pregnancy comes as a surprise within that passage and isn't hinted at beforehand - it might have been more effective not to have the attack on Unfair trailed so clearly so that the contrast between new life and uncertain fate is heightened. (Marx's coma - though is it really a coma if he's that aware? - is well done, though, with a real tension over whether he will survive)

- Timeshifting. Most of the shifting between timeframes is done clearly and confidently, but occasionally it's a bit confused. With Sam's finding of Tuesday we're introduced to the idea that he has a dog, then the time shifts and it's not clear how much of it is in the "past" vs him driving around in the present, and whether this is a second dog or (as it turns out to be) his first encounter with Tuesday. Similarly there's an early reference to Freda's death and then she crops up again unexpectedly at a different point in the book and then is dead again, offscreen, later on.

- the bottom of p132 has a "pubic" where I am pretty sure it should be "public"

- Sadie's long grudge against Sam, triggered by the message on the Dead Sea CD, doesn't really ring true. I can see how it's necessary to drive the plot but it's too sudden a shift to be plausible. We either need to see more of her feelings over her second time around with Dov and resentment about how she got into it so that having someone to blame for it is a way of masking her own guilt and self-loathing over it, or we need more of her building the realisation into a barrier between them - it's too sudden a shift.

3. A book about the games we create, in real life or on the screen, and the people we create them with.

4. The use of gaming as a way to explore how we live and relate was well done and thought provoking.

5. Solution. The creation and promotion of Ichigo. Anything to do with Marx (but why did an arch-capitalist call his son Marx?), including his end and the other characters' reactions to it. The final chapter. The sequence with the other Anna Lee.

(Oh - and is the title Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow (per this discussion room) or Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (which is what's on the header in the galleys))

I somehow went into this expecting sci-fi - however, despite that misunderstanding (and spending the first third of the book waiting for that element to kick in!) I found this really compelling. I was enthralled by Sadie and Sam's story (and adored Marx). The writing is beautiful, and really flows - I underlined lots of passages as I was reading, which hasn't happened in a while. I also found that this novel stayed with me after reading - it gave me lots to think about, and I was especially intrigued by some of the comments on the effects of being a regular gamer upon your life outlook.

Thank you for the opportunity to read 'Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow'.

Initially, this seems to be a book about gaming which is not a topic I know much about however, it develops into so much more - a story over a period of about thirty years, charting the relationship between Sam and Sadie who meet as adolescents. Their relationship is deep and very human with its joys and painful times.

I was fascinated to read that Gabrielle Zevin's parents actually worked in the gaming industry and Sam's cultural background is similar to Sam's. There are obviously autobiographical aspects to the novel.

I’ll start by saying that I absolutely loved this novel set in the world of independent computer games from the 90s onwards.

It took me a chapter or so to get into the book but then I was swept up in the story of Sam, Sadie and Marx – who end up setting up a games company with games created mostly by Sam and Sadie.

Sam and Sadie themselves first meet when Sam is in hospital as a child and he runs into Sadie who develops a close bond with Sam who has suffered a trauma that we only become fully aware of later on in the novel.
The timeline flickers back and forth, with flashbacks from the near present – interviews given to Kotaku – but the narrative really flowing from the time that Sam and Sadie find themselves both at college at the same time.
This is a story that fully immerses itself in video games and the culture of setting up a video games company. But in truth it’s also about relationships – at the heart of it, Sam and Sadie. And the relationship between those characters is very real. They rely on each other to create their games, but they also hurt one another at times. Between them is Sam’s roommate from college, Marx, who is the do-er who gets their company set up and provides the initial resources to allow them to follow their dreams.

This beautiful book fully conveys the world of independent gaming, and while I have never been a hardened gamer, there was enough here for me to recognise the depth to which author Gabrielle Zevin has gone to create this world.

I came away from this book really wanting to play Ichigo, their launch title the gameplay of which is beautifully described.

Thoroughly recommended.

Gabrielle Zevin is a writer I have always admired. She doesn't disappoint in this novel about two gamers. Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in hospital where they bond over a love of computer games. They mature into successful game designers whose internal worlds deeply affect their relationship. Game playing is a central theme in an unusual yet worthwhile read.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a novel about video games, and friendship, and ultimately about kinds of love and what it takes to create things. Sam and Sadie meet in a hospital in 1987 and bond over Super Mario, but then their friendship falls apart. Years later, both at college, they run into each other in a train station. Immediately they know they must be friends again, and they start working to make a game together, along with Sam's roommate Marx. Together, they create a game and find success, but as they attempt to build upon this and make more, it is clear that the real world isn't as perfectly designed as a game one.

This is an intriguing book, especially for anyone who likes gaming. From the opening, it is clear that the world of video games is very much intertwined with it, as well as being the narrative as the protagonists work to make games, and it's fun to have those references within it, as it has a real sense of gaming history. There's a lot of description of making games and what they put into the games, and some interesting exploration of things like gender and sexuality within the gaming world, and ideas of cultural appropriation in games. A section later in the book is written as a game (for a reason that becomes clear) and that felt like something a bit different and fresh, though at first it might feel like a sudden departure from the narrative.

Other than games, the book is particularly centred around friendship and love, and different kinds of relationships. In particular, there's Sam and Sadie's dynamic, which the book examines a lot and even looks into some of their moments of miscommunication, showing how things aren't as simple when they aren't scripted in a game. The focus on the love within friendship is very important, and especially when it can also be tempestuous and blurred between business partners and friends. Marx is also a great character, bringing out how there's often other people's work behind big creative partnerships, but also showing a quietly purposeful kind of friendship between him and Sam.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (on a side note, I really enjoyed when the title was explained, both for the reference and why it is relevant) is a surprising book, a novel that focuses on video games and creating art, but also on friendship above all else, and the work that goes into friendships as well as creating video games. The narrative voice is distinctive, filled with detail and prescient comments, and might not be for everyone, but the content and worlds the book explores feel fresh, a different take on nostalgia and building on the past.

This is one of my favourite books of the year. It is a beautifully written story, the unconventional love story of two people who meet aged 11.. If you were to read that it is about gaming, and creation of the games, you might not wish to read it. Don't be deterred! It's simply a really good story that I rushed through, enjoying all the twists and turns. It's a reflection on what's important growing up, family and friendship, oh and a bit of Shakespeare too.

I've been a huge fan of Zevin's work since the incredible Elsewhere came out in the UK and this book betters even that,
I'm not a gamer but like the best books or films not knowing the intricacies of this world didn't detract at all, enough detail was given that I could follow everything and it made me want to play some of the games created.
So many different topics are touched on in the novel which will make great discussion points in book groups but it never became an 'issues' book - just a fantastic novel about a cast of characters who you love/hate/are exasperated by as you would be in real life.