Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

For hyped up novels, it's difficult for them to deliver. It's never really the fault of the novel or the novelist. People fall in love with something because it perfectly aligns to their tastes, then they become a loud public advocate for it and it snowballs from there.

Needless to say, my expectations going into this one were, “this will be fine, I guess.” It was a lot better than fine. It was really good.

This is one of those novels that covers a long period of time, focusing on the relationships between two characters, Sadie and Sam. There is a third character, Marx, who's in the mix, but Marx is more, in his own words, an NPC of sorts. He's there as the muse and support for both characters, sometimes more, sometimes less, but a pivotal part of their lives.

Sadie met Sam when her sister was in the hospital with leukemia. A nurse saw her, bored in a waiting room daily, and pointed her towards a playroom set up for the kids, where she met Sam, an odd boy who was playing Super Mario Bros. It turned out Sam hadn't spoken to anyone in weeks after getting in a horrific car accident that mangled his foot and killed his mother. There was just something about Sadie and Sam that worked.

So, when they met up again years later in Boston while they were both in different colleges, Sadie handed off a student project videogame she was working on led to Sam and his roommate, Marx, playing it and finding it amazing. A bulk of the novel focuses on the creative relationship that ensues between the three, with Sadie and Sam creating a super popular, mildly artistic game, while Marx helped manage operations, which blossomed into them forming a game studio, developing more games together, and having the friction that creative partners always run into.

There was never a romantic relationship between Sadie and Sam, something they both mull over numerous times in their lives, but realize they're already partners even when they are furious at each other, coping with the loss of a shared loved one, and dealing with all of life's complications. There are parts that are heartbreaking and prescient. What happens to Marx is... well, I wasn't quite sure if it was necessary, but it served its purpose, I suppose.

I enjoyed that it showed a realistic creative relationship without feeling the need to dip into a basic love triangle kind of thing. Creative relationships are real, different, and can be intense. Sometimes that's enough of a story worth exploring, and this one was.