RavePaste... while fans of her more recent adult work seem, on the whole, to be surprised by the innovative emotional and formal somersaulting of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (out this week from Knopf Doubleday), anyone who’s at all versed in her YA work will immediately understand that everything she took such big teen-oriented swings at a dozen years ago—not just emotional themes and character types, but also temporally interwoven narrative devices, a deep interest in how people grow and change from childhood to old age, and an playfully circular theory of life—she’s pulled together into one expansive world with the emotional wallop of a tale that is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow ... When I say I haven’t wept as long and as hard at any piece of media in recent memory, I’m not indulging in rhetorical hyperbole: for the last four hours of the book (which, as is my wont, I listened to on audio), I was a complete mess. But it’s not just the snot-provoking kind of devastation that Zevin proves so skilled at developing with this book. Wedged as they are into both the time and the industry that they find themselves in, both Sam and Sadie end up walking through some of the prickliest, most sociologically devastating landscapes of the last few decades, landscapes through which—Zevin being Zevin, and thus a master of the variably unlikable protagonist—neither acquits themselves particularly well ... ow able you are to stomach these darker moments will dictate how able to you are to get through Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow at all.
Stan Lee and Kat Rosenfield
MixedPaste...A Trick of Light has flaws as a novel-length project. Between Nia’s mysteriously overbearing father, Cam’s dead-or-maybe-disappeared tech genius dad’s ex-partner’s bionic daughter’s secret world-dominating tech company, the hive-minded alien taking over bodies in her attempt to enact revenge on at least one of those dads, the domestic relationships Cam is trying to maintain, and the romantic relationship Cam and Nia develop, there’s too much going on...to follow. Gender is also treated in a frustratingly outdated way. Every villain but two are female (and of the two that aren’t, one is revealed to have just been a misunderstood hero), and female-coded things (pink blended coffee drinks, the singing of \'I Feel Pretty\') are presented as inherently humiliating and bad. The story’s cliffhanger suggests this will be a new series, so A Trick of Light doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to excite the reader about what’s to follow and get them thinking about humanity’s reliance on technology.
