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alobear ([personal profile] alobear) wrote2024-05-20 06:29 pm

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

People have been recommending Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin to me for a while, and then it was picked for our next family book club meeting...

I read it in two days over the weekend - and I have complicated thoughts about it.

In a nutshell, I started out wanting to love it but it wouldn't let me. I ended up wanting to hate it but it wouldn't let me do that either...

It felt very emotionally manipulative (I was affected by certain aspects but I could see what it was doing to achieve that and it annoyed me), it also felt very inconsistent in places, with lots of telling rather than showing, and a seeming lack of outlining (events/people/things kept being introduced out of nowhere and then we'd get a couple of pages of background to explain them and then they'd never appear again).

And then it utilised my all-time least favourite fiction trope...

But, even after that, it got me in the feels a couple more times.

So, yeah, complicated...

I really wanted to love it - and I tried really hard - and I know a lot of people do, so I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who should read this book and will really enjoy it. I'm just not one of them.