A sweeping, decades-long story of creativity, collaboration, and the complicated love that exists between two people who never quite manage to be in the same place at the same time. Sam and Sadie meet as children bonded by video games, lose each other, and find their way back through the making of art. But success, resentment, and the weight of being misunderstood have a way of pulling people apart even when they're standing in the same room.
My Review
There is something about this book that just sits with you. I finished it days ago and I am still turning it over, still thinking about Sam and Sadie and Marx and everything that gets lost and found and lost again between people who love each other.
It starts in a hospital. Sam, recovering from a horrific injury, has shut himself off from the world entirely until a girl named Sadie walks in and hands him a controller. That image alone does something to you. Games as lifeline. Games as the language two people share when they don’t know how to speak to each other any other way.
The friendship fractures, as friendships do. Eight years pass. Then a chance encounter pulls them back together, and what follows is three decades of collaboration, brilliance, jealousy, miscommunication, and love in every form except the straightforward kind. They build something remarkable together, and the real world, which does not treat everyone equally or fairly, begins to do its damage. One of them gets more credit. Resentments calcify. They are working side by side and somehow completely alone.
And then there is Marx. Marx, who is everything. The best friend, the best partner, the person who holds the whole structure together without anyone fully appreciating it until later. I wanted everyone in my life to be a Marx. I know that’s not how the world works. That’s part of what makes this book hurt.
Zevin weaves gaming into the narrative in a way that never feels like a gimmick. The idea that in a game you get more lives, that dying doesn’t have to mean the end, that everyone starts on equal footing, carries real emotional weight here. The word “dysentery” made me laugh every single time.
This is a book about creativity and friendship and how love doesn’t have to be romantic to be the most important relationship of your life. Four stars, and I suspect I’ll feel differently about it the second time I read it.