I feel like this book by Gabrielle Zevin was everywhere, so I got the audiobook from my library. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying attention to when it was due and I still had about two and a half hours to go when it disappeared from my phone. I had to get back on the waitlist and wait a month and a half to find out how it ended! I’m sure that colored my perception of this book, but I don’t know if it was for better or worse.
I’ve seen and heard a lot of people saying this is the best book they read all year. I liked this book, but I didn’t love it as much as everyone else seems to. Although hearing that does make me wonder what was the best book I read all year? Probably this one.
This book is about a lot of things. It’s tempting to say that it’s about gaming, but it’s about so much more than that. It’s about friendship and the different kinds of human connection.
The two main characters are Sam and Sadie. Sam is the only son of a Korean woman and a white man. His parents never married and his dad has never been a part of his life. His mom raised him on her own before dying in a car crash when Sam was about 10 years old. He was in the car with her and his legs were mangled. He spent weeks in the hospital while they healed, but they continued to give him problems for the rest of his life.
It was in the hospital that he met Sadie and they bonded over video games. Sadie’s older sister was in the hospital getting treated for cancer (spoiler alert, she survives) and Sadie happened to come upon Sam playing video games and they quickly bonded over their love of video games.
Eventually they have a fight and lose touch, but they reconnect in college. They attend different schools, but they’re both on the east coast and they run into each other in the subway and they strike up their friendship again. Sadie had been taking a class on making video games and gave Sam a copy of her game to play and tell her what he thinks of it. And if you want to play that game IRL, you can! It’s right here.
At some point Sam and Sadie decide to make a video game together. They give themselves the summer, but of course it takes much longer than that, so they take off the first semester of the upcoming year to continue working on the game, and eventually they drop out of college altogether to produce video games. They luck out because Sam’s roommate, Marx, happens to be rich and is willing to fund the production of this game.
Fast forward a few years and the game becomes a huge success. Sam, Sadie, and Marx all go into business together. They leave the east coast to move back to L.A. and start a business. The book covers their struggles and successes in working together — mainly Sam and Sadie’s struggles and successes in working together. They’re both brilliant and love games, but they’re also both very opinionated and sometimes have a hard time meeting in the middle. As a result, Marx is often caught in the middle.
The book also touches on sexism and homophobia in the gaming industry, gun culture, as well as the shifting attitudes regarding representations of minority cultures from people who do not belong to that community. Almost every trigger warning you can think of is included in this book.
One trigger warning particularly got under my skin because of the way it was portrayed. When Sam first runs into Sadie in the subway she’s on her way to meet her boyfriend/married professor. As if it’s not gross enough that she’s dating her professor, he turns out to be abusive and I don’t think Zevin has any idea what an abusive relationship is really like.
A big reason Sam and Marx decide to move to California is to get Sadie away from that relationship, but they know they can’t tell her that because she won’t admit anything is wrong. Rather than offering to help her pack up her stuff so she can move with them, they leave her to confront her abusive boyfriend on her own and tell him she’s leaving. Does Zevin not realize this is the point when most women in an abusive relationship die? Abusers are abusive because they are terrified their partner will abandon them. Tell them you’re leaving and they will react violently.
The professor does handcuff her to his bed for most of a day and she acts like that’s no big deal. As if being completely stripped of your autonomy is no big deal.
And then he just lets her go. The man who had been hitting her for no reason just lets her leave without any further physical abuse. Yeah, that doesn’t happen.
Zevin barely mentions that character ever again except when he and Sadie are having brunch, which further goes to show how lightly she takes abusive relationships. She seems to think it’s normal, not only to escape, but to escape without any emotional scars.
But I digress. That was a small part of the book, and I have spent way too much time in this review breaking down all the reasons it bothered me. I’d really like to talk about Sam and Sadie’s relationship, but I don’t want to spoil the ending for you because it did not end the way I thought it would. You’ll just have to read the book, find out for yourself, and let me know what you think.