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What it argues
Sam and Sadie meet as children in a hospital, bonded by Mario Bros. and mutual loneliness, then lose touch, then find each other again in their twenties at Harvard and MIT. They make a video game together. It becomes a phenomenon. They spend the next thirty years making games, fighting, grieving, almost getting together romantically but mostly not, and building something that turns out to be the defining work of both their lives. The title comes from Macbeth, and Zevin means it: this is a novel about time running out, about what we make before we go.
The novel is a love story with video games as its medium, but it is more precisely a novel about collaborative creation and what it does to the people doing it. Sam and Sadie's relationship resists easy categorization — it is not quite friendship, not quite romance, not quite partnership, but something that encompasses all three and is destroyed and rebuilt multiple times. Zevin is interested in the particular intimacy of making something together: how it bonds and how it suffocates, how the work becomes a third party in the relationship with claims of its own.
What it gets right
- 1.
The deepest love story in the novel is not romantic — it is the love of two people for the work they make together, and what that work costs them.
- 2.
Collaboration requires a specific kind of trust that is both more durable and more fragile than romantic love; the novel shows both sides.
- 3.
Video games are treated as a serious art form throughout, and Zevin makes that case convincingly by showing the creative decisions behind Sam and Sadie's best work.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Gabrielle Zevin is an American novelist and screenwriter who has written across multiple genres and age categories. Her previous novels include The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, which became a bestseller and was adapted as a film, and a young adult series. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, published in 2022, was her breakout work of adult literary fiction, winning widespread critical acclaim and appearing on numerous best-of-year lists. She lives in Los Angeles. The novel's video game sequences draw on her longtime interest in game design.
