by Gabrielle Zevin
4.3 · 4 reviewsTwo friends, decades of games and grief, and the unfinished business of loving someone you refuse to call by that name.
Sam and Sadie meet as children in a hospital game room and reconnect years later as students in Cambridge, Massachusetts. United by a shared obsession with games and an instinct for what makes play feel like life, they decide to build something together. The result is a hit that turns two unknowns into wunderkinds and binds them in a partnership that proves more intimate, and more combustible, than any romance.
Across more than thirty years, the novel follows their collaborations and their fractures: the games they design, the studio they grow, the people who orbit them, and the rivalries, betrayals, and missed timing that keep pulling them apart and back together. It is a story about creative work as a form of love, about disability and identity, and about the worlds we invent so we can keep starting over.
Spanning the 1980s arcade era to the modern studio age, Gabrielle Zevin writes about ambition and tenderness with equal attention. This is a sweeping, deeply felt portrait of two people who understand each other best through the things they make, and the long argument over whether that is enough.
First published in 2022.
4 reviews
What surprised me most is how much this is about the act of making something with another person. I work in software and the depiction of collaboration, ego, and credit felt painfully accurate. Cried more than once. Bought two copies for friends.
I picked it up expecting to be lost in the gaming stuff and instead I was wrecked by the friendship at the center of it. Sam and Sadie feel completely real, infuriating and lovable in equal measure. The chapter that jumps perspective near the end gutted me. Easily my favorite read of the year.
Zevin is so good at the ache of two people who love each other in a way neither will name. The Los Angeles years sagged for me and I wished a couple of side plots had been trimmed, but the emotional payoff is worth the patience. The structure is clever without being showy.
Smart, ambitious, clearly heartfelt. But I kept feeling held at arm's length by the prose, like I was being told these characters were brilliant rather than feeling it myself. The grief subplot landed hard, though, and I understand why so many people adore this one.