Book Review | The Office BFFs by Jenna Fischer & Angela Kinsley
November 25, 2022Book Series on my TBR
November 25, 2022
★★★★☆
401 pages
Published: July 5, 2022
by Knopf Publishing Group
In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends–often in love, but never lovers–come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.
Main Characters
- Sam Masur – Harvard student, video game creator. He was in a terrible car accident when he was young that ruined his foot
- Sadie – MIT student, video game creator. Meets Sam at the hospital while her sister is recovering from leukemia
- Alice – Sadie’s sister, had childhood leukemia and eventually goes to med school
- Marx – Sam’s roommate; takes him under his wing and helps him thrive. He ends up being a producer for the games
- Dov – Advanced Graphic professor at MIT; creator of very successful game Dead Sea, Has a wife and kid in Israel, Sadie’s boyfriend
- Ant and Simon – Creators of the game Counterpart High
- Dong Hyun and Bong Cha – Sam’s grandparents – own Dong and Bong’s New York Style House of Pizza where Sam grew up playing Donkey Kong
- Freda – Sadie’s grandma
- Anna Lee – Sam’s mom, she was a successful performer in New York before moving to California
- Baby Naomi
- Lola – high school girlfriend of Sam’s
My Review
I was a little hesitant when I saw it was centered around video games since I have no interest in that. However; I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It is more about relationships between people than it is about the games themselves, although the games are a reflection of these relationships. This was a very character driven book, with the video games that were created almost being an additional character.
I would absolutely recommend this book – don’t let that it is based on video games deter you from picking it up!
Likes
- I was happy with the ending – that it wasn’t a completely happy ending and not super cliche
- The complicated relationships between all of the characters was well developed
Dislikes
- I did not like the Pioneers chapter…
Summary and Spoilers
*SPOILERS – Do NOT expand this section unless you want to know the spoilers!*
Sam and Sadie become friend at the hospital while her sister is recovering from cancer and he is recovering from multiple surgeries inflicted from a car accident that also killed his mom. Sam ends up not talking to Sadie for years because he thought she was only pretending to be his friend as community service. They run into each other again when they are both in college and Sam wants to make a game with Sadie. Sadie made a game that basically called her classmates Nazis and Sam loved it. Sadie is in a bad place when he finds her to ask because she has just had an abortion with Dov’s child. She finally agrees to make a game with Sam and they release a hit game. They go on to create more hit games and also failures. They move to California so that Sam can have his leg amputated. Sadie finds out that Sam knew Dov had been her ex when he sent her to ask to borrow his game engine for their game – which led them into an unhealthy relationship. She blames Sam for it and stops talking to him.
Sadie gets pregnant with Marx. Marx is killed by an upset video game player whose wife left him for someone she met on their game. The killer had come to shoot Mazer, but he wasn’t at the office. Ant also get shot, but he recovers. Sadie has her baby, finishes a game an expansion pack for her game right before the deadline. Sadie moves to Boston to teach Dov’s old class at MIT. Sadie and Sam finally talk and start to work on their friendship.