Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

This is such a good book that all the time I was reading it I was wondering who I could give it to as a present. I suppose the target audience would be millennials who grew up playing computer games, but I was hooked right from the start and I am someone's great grandmother and I don't play computer games.

There is such a sensitivity in the character descriptions that you can almost feel the presence of Sam and Sadie who meet by chance in a break-out area of a hospital children's ward and find themselves bonding over a video game. They are only about ten or eleven when they meet, and Sam is there because his foot has been crushed in a car accident, and Sadie has to spend time at the hospital with her parents because her sister is being treated for cancer. It's a rough time for both of them but playing the games allows them to escape into another world for a while and they are comfortable in each other's company. Normally this wouldn't seem so extraordinary, but at this point in time Sam is so traumatised by things he has experienced that he has not spoken to anyone for months, and even in better times he found it hard to socialise.

As they get older, both go to different colleges to study the art of writing computer games, and back in the era of Super Mario, it was unusual for girls to take this kind of course, so Sadie feels that she has to put in extra effort if she wants to stand out. Fortunately she has natural creative ability and imagines scenarios for games that are very different from anything her tutor has seen before. Sam is also creating games for his course, and after a chance meeting they end up writing a game that breaks new ground and is so important to them that they defer their final college year to finish it.

The game is described in great detail, and even if I wouldn't be much good at playing it, I would want to have a look at it because it was also a piece of art. I would also have liked to meet all the characters who live in America but come from very diverse backgrounds. This book is not a best seller by chance, it is an exceptional piece of writing and I pretty certain that a copy will be wrapped and presented to my millennial son for his birthday next month. This time the book is worth the hype.

Comments

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