February 1, 2022

When Harvard junior Sam Masur encounters estranged childhood friend Sadie Green on a subway platform, she initially ignores him but then relents. And a good thing, too, for they end up collaborating on video games that soon bring them fame and fortune. But however perfect those digital worlds, the sorrows and duplicity of the imperfect real world await. From the New York Times best-selling author of The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry.

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Starred review from April 18, 2022
Zevin (Young Jane Young) returns with an exhilarating epic of friendship, grief, and computer game development. In 1986, Sadie Green, 11, visits a children’s hospital where her sister is recovering from cancer. There, she befriends another patient, a 12-year-old Korean Jewish boy named Sam Masur, who has a badly injured foot, and the two bond over their love for video games. Their friendship ruptures, however, after Sam discovers Sadie’s been tallying the visits to fulfill her bat mitzvah service. Years later, they reconnect while attending college in Boston. Sam is wowed by a game Sadie developed, called Solution. In it, a player who doesn’t ask questions will unknowingly build a widget for the Third Reich, thus forcing the player to reflect on the impact of their moral choices. He proposes they design a game together, and relying on help from his charming, wealthy Japanese Korean roommate, Marx, and Sadie’s instructor cum abusive lover, Dov, they score a massive hit with Ichigo, inspired by The Tempest. In 2004, their virtual world-builder Mapletown allows for same-sex marriages, drawing ire from conservatives, and a violent turn upends everything for Sam and Sadie. Zevin layers the narrative with her characters’ wrenching emotional wounds as their relationships wax and wane, including Sadie’s resentment about sexism in gaming, Sam’s loss of his mother, and his foot amputation. Even more impressive are the visionary and transgressive games (another, a shooter, is based on the poems of Emily Dickinson). This is a one-of-a-kind achievement. Agent: Doug Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic.

Starred review from July 1, 2022

In her latest, best-selling novelist Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry) creates a story about the wild ups and downs of friendship and love. It opens with Sadie keeping her sister company during cancer treatments at the hospital, where Sam is anticipating surgery on his badly mangled foot. When they meet in the hospital game room and play a computer game together, a nurse asks Sadie to come back for more gaming with Sam. More than 600 hospital visits later, they have a fight and don't speak again for six years. Finally reconnecting as college students in Boston, they begin designing games together, and Sam's roommate, Marx, helps them launch and run a business they call Unfair Games. Their first game is a big success, which unfortunately brings out the worst in each of them. As the business expands, so do the jealousies and disagreements, even when they become a couple. Eventually, their relationship is tested by tragedy. VERDICT Zevin creates beautifully flawed characters often caught between the real and gaming worlds, which are cleverly juxtaposed to highlight their similarities and differences. Both readers of love stories and gamers will enjoy. Highly recommended.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2022
The adventures of a trio of genius kids united by their love of gaming and each other. When Sam Masur recognizes Sadie Green in a crowded Boston subway station, midway through their college careers at Harvard and MIT, he shouts, "SADIE MIRANDA GREEN. YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY!" This is a reference to the hundreds of hours--609 to be exact--the two spent playing "Oregon Trail" and other games when they met in the children's ward of a hospital where Sam was slowly and incompletely recovering from a traumatic injury and where Sadie was secretly racking up community service hours by spending time with him, a fact which caused the rift that has separated them until now. They determine that they both still game, and before long they're spending the summer writing a soon-to-be-famous game together in the apartment that belongs to Sam's roommate, the gorgeous, wealthy acting student Marx Watanabe. Marx becomes the third corner of their triangle, and decades of action ensue, much of it set in Los Angeles, some in the virtual realm, all of it riveting. A lifelong gamer herself, Zevin has written the book she was born to write, a love letter to every aspect of gaming. For example, here's the passage introducing the professor Sadie is sleeping with and his graphic engine, both of which play a continuing role in the story: "The seminar was led by twenty-eight-year-old Dov Mizrah....It was said of Dov that he was like the two Johns (Carmack, Romero), the American boy geniuses who'd programmed and designed Commander Keen and Doom, rolled into one. Dov was famous for his mane of dark, curly hair, wearing tight leather pants to gaming conventions, and yes, a game called Dead Sea, an underwater zombie adventure, originally for PC, for which he had invented a groundbreaking graphics engine, Ulysses, to render photorealistic light and shadow in water." Readers who recognize the references will enjoy them, and those who don't can look them up and/or simply absorb them. Zevin's delight in her characters, their qualities, and their projects sprinkles a layer of fairy dust over the whole enterprise. Sure to enchant even those who have never played a video game in their lives, with instant cult status for those who have.

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