Zevin's novel lived up to all the hype -- a story about two lifelong friends who are devoted to each other but struggle to communicate. Sam and Sadie meet as children in a hospital and immediately bond over Super Mario Bros. We follow them as they drop out of college (Harvard and MIT), create a ground-breaking video game, found their own company, and split over competing visions. There are misunderstandings and arguments, betrayals and tragedies, but they can never quite let go of each other. It's a moving, nuanced portrayal of a deep friendship between too prickly, creative, troubled people.
It's also a paean to creative work, and the drive to make something. Sam focuses on what's popular, what will get the most players, and Sadie cares more about the art and storytelling, but they both want to design a game that will matter to other players, and both are uncompromising in their own ways.
Sadie and Sam are the main focus of the narrative, but the book is filled with other characters in orbit around them, most notably Marx, the loyal friend to both and the one who bankrolled their vision. At one point, in a burst of anger, Sam calls him an "NPC" -- non-player character -- and says he doesn't matter. But as Marx points out, without NPCs there's nothing for the player character to do. Marx may continually take a back seat to Sam and Sadie, but his effect on them, and his role in the story, make up the core of the novel. Zevin excels in creating wonderfully realized characters, and in Marx she created one of my favorites ever.
If there is one flaw in the book, it's that the narration is a bit inconsistent. With two notable (and brilliantly effective) examples late in the book, Zevin uses an omniscient third-person point of view, but there's a moment early in the book where the narration changes slightly, as if the story is being told to a specific audience by a specific person. This peters out (perhaps the legacy of an earlier draft?) and the omniscient point of view reasserts itself, until it doesn't for a heart-breaking turn two thirds of the way through.
I absolutely loved this book. And I want to start playing video games again.
