Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Sam Masur and Sadie Green meet as children in a Los Angeles hospital in the late 1980s, he recovering from the reconstructive foot surgeries that followed a car crash that killed his mother, she keeping her hospitalized older sister company, and the two bond for months over a shared Nintendo console before losing touch under circumstances neither fully explains until much later. They reconnect by accident in a Boston train station while both are in college, Sam at Harvard studying mathematics, Sadie at MIT studying computer science, and Sadie's brilliant, half finished student project becomes the seed of Ichigo, an adventure game about a lost child trying to find home that the two build together over a single winter break and that turns into a genuine cultural phenomenon once it ships. They found a studio, Unfair Games, with Sam's college roommate Marx Watanabe managing the business side neither designer wants to touch, and the book follows the three of them and the games they make together, Ichigo, then a virtual world called Mapleworld, across three decades of professional triumph and personal wreckage: Sadie's exploitative affair with an older mentor, a serious accident that leaves Sam in chronic pain for years, Sadie's own struggle with postpartum depression, and a mass shooting at Unfair's own offices, carried out by a man enraged that Mapleworld allows same sex marriage inside the game, that kills Marx and permanently fractures Sam and Sadie's partnership. The two spend years apart and mostly unspeaking, until Sam secretly builds Sadie an entire game of her own, in which he has spent months playing every character, including her in game spouse, to say what he could never say to her directly. Sadie eventually discovers what he has done, and the two reconcile, the novel closing as the two begin planning Unfair's next game together rather than on any single, tidy resolution.

Zevin treats game design as a serious creative discipline rather than a novelty backdrop, walking through the mechanics, the arguments and the all night crunches of actually building something with real craft, and she uses a game's built in promise of another life, another try, another save file, to mirror how badly her two central characters want a second chance at their own friendship. It reads warmly and moves quickly across a genuinely long span of time, and its refusal to turn Sam and Sadie's bond into a conventional romance is deliberate and, for many readers, the book's most memorable choice; readers who want the two to simply fall in love will keep waiting for a scene the novel never gives them.