I buddy-read this with Leslie but I was a terrible buddy reader this time because after I got to a certain % on the third day of our read, I found myself physically unable to stop and I ended up finishing the book way ahead of her. 🫣 Not only did I finish ahead, but I couldn’t stop telling her how much I cried and hurt while reading. The things she has to put up with from me! 😂 ILY, friend!

*****

TL;DR: So much of this book is full of things that I hate. Semi-love triangles, toxic relationships, terribly unlikeable characters who consistently make poor decisions, and a horrendous lack of communication between characters. And YET, I seem to have found myself loving this book. Zevin pulled me in right from the beginning and didn’t let go until the very end. She turned me into this raging, ugly crying, hot mess of a human with the intensity of the emotion she evokes throughout this story. This book is tragically sad and painful and at times unpleasant to endure but it will make you feel EVERYTHING, AND EVERYTHING, AND EVERYTHING. And that’s why I loved this book so much.

I honestly don’t know if there’s anything I could say that other people haven’t already but you know I’m here to write my essay! It’s been quite a while since I’ve read any literary fiction, and though this is my first book by Zevin, it’s safe to say that she has a new fan in me and it certainly won’t be my last!

There are actually plenty of reasons that I think readers won’t like this and I get it. There’s a lot in this that I normally wouldn’t like and though I often found myself frustrated with what was happening in the story, I was surprised to find myself fully invested in Sam and Sadie from the beginning. If you have no interest in gaming or game dev, you might find yourself bored and not enjoy this. You might struggle if you don’t like a slow-paced slice-of-life type of story that meanders here and there. And if you can’t tolerate unlikeable characters who repeatedly make awful life decisions, without facing any weighty repercussions, then you’ll probably really not like this. I would also advise checking the content warnings before reading as certain parts of the story can be triggering or just be generally unpleasant to read.

But on the other hand…

This is a coming-of-age about two friends who are repeatedly pulled together and grow apart over the course of a lifetime. It’s such a humanistic story. They share dreams, successes, and failures. They experience joy, hate, jealousy and many other complicated and messy emotions that we do in real life. It’s mostly about game development and the countless hours of work that go into it. It’s always about friendship, family, love and loyalty. It’s about coping with hardships, grief and loss, processing and healing. It’s about finding YOUR people and thriving with them. The author also touches on social injustices, racism, and sexism in such a conversational tone and I enjoyed the way she weaved the social commentary into the story; it’s prominent but not shoved down your throat. There is also rep for disability and chronic illness and pain that was written in an organic way.

“This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”

This was an extremely readable book albeit there’s a deep sense of melancholia that permeates the whole thing and it made me Incredibly Sad™️—I mean, I was intermittently ugly crying/silently tracking tears down my face while reading the last three parts. I was shocked by how quickly I flew through these pages, even when certain chapters were filled with intimidatingly thick chunks of text. Zevin’s prose was excellent and I enjoyed how quickly she pulled me into the lives of these fictional people. The gaming aspect was so much fun and I loved the creativity and the behind-the-scenes of what it takes to make a game. It was wonderfully nostalgic to read about many of the games I played in my childhood from Oregon Trail to Sonic the Hedgehog and Crash Bandicoot to Doom to Harvest Moon. I loved and still love these games so much and reading about them made me feel wistful but you don’t need to be a gamer to enjoy the passion they have for it.

“It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”

I marvelled at how Zevin was able to make me care about and feel wholly invested in deeply flawed characters that I would normally detest. If I’m being honest, Sam & Sadie especially were so easy to dislike (and at times maybe even to hate) and I often vacillated between those two feelings. If you’re looking for a story with an honest and wholesome friendship full of love this is not the one! What starts as a life-saving childhood connection begins again as a rekindled friendship after years of estrangement, and eventually becomes a hurtful and ugly thing that ends up being more toxic for these characters than anything good. Though they were equally flawed, I empathised more with Sam after a certain point. He was often a crude asshole and while I might not have liked how he acted and some of the decisions he made, there’s such a relatable and sometimes pitiful quality to him that made him so painfully human. I also saw parts of myself in how he viewed himself and my heart hurt from all the trauma he experienced in his life and how alone he was through everything.

“Why do you keep coming?” she asked.
“Because,” he said. Click on this word, he thought, and you will find links to everything it means. Because you are my oldest friend. Because, once, when I was at my lowest, you saved me. Because I might have died without you or ended up in a children’s psychiatric hospital. Because I owe you. Because, selfishly, I see a future where we make fantastic games together, if you can manage to get out of bed. “Because,” he repeated.”

In contrast, I found Sadie incredibly difficult to tolerate even when I empathised with the things she endured to find success in her work. She’s sharp and brilliant but I couldn’t stand how she took absolutely zero responsibility for her own actions. She projected every hurtful experience and all her spiteful and jealous emotions onto Sam. She was literally the worst and I found it unforgivable how easy it was for her to abandon and vilify her closest friend over something assumed and yet she so easily forgave others who hurt her and easily welcomed them back into her life, including her abusive groomer of an ex. Although I agree that Sam & Sadie treated each other poorly, I hated how unnecessarily cruel she became in their later years. It wasn’t even satisfying to see her acknowledge her cruelty when she looks back on the actions of her younger self. Yes, friends can sometimes be hurtful and take each other for granted but not like this and ultimately, it made me sad that their friendship became a farce of what one should be.

Out of everyone though, my favourite person was the “NPC” in their story, Marx. Generous and kind, fun-loving and charming, and oh-so-devastatingly handsome Marx Watanabe. My heart! 🥹 He’s the glue that keeps their dream running and he’s their person when they’re no longer each others’ persons. Life is unfair and let’s just say that when the title of this book became clear to me, it knocked me absolutely flat!

“Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?”

So now that I’ve written this essay, I’m not sure if it’s any clearer why I loved this book so much. 😂 As I said, I normally wouldn’t enjoy so many elements in this story but I’m an emotional reader and sad books, while they make me ugly cry, also usually end up making me feel so much that I end up loving them. For all the flaws in this story, Zevin had a Herculean grip on my emotions right from the start and she managed to not only make me feel every spectrum of emotion throughout this read but she made me feel it all SO FCKING MUCH.

What else can I say except that I loved it?

Have you read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow or is it on your TBR?

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