I started this book with a very open mind – the idea of a book based on two nerdy best friends making video games together certainly doesn't seem like something I would normally be into, but hey, I wouldn't have thought a book about an old butler talking about buttling would be interesting either, and The Remains of the Day is one of my favorite books of all time.
Ultimately though, I got to the halfway point of this book and had to DNF, my first DNF of a novel in quite some time. I though the characters were the weakest and least interesting of any book I've read in a while. Sam and Sadie were both absolutely insufferable to me, and Marx was nice but so bland that I didn't get any enjoyment out of his character either.
I also felt that the book dealt with its issues in a very young adult oriented drama sort of way. All the difficult topics that the book tries to take on seem incredibly on the nose to me. For instance, I didn't think Sadie's relationship with Dov was depicted in a very adept way – it felt much more like it was intended to be something a teenage girl could relate to. Which of course is fine, there's certainly a place for that sort of writing in the world, but it doesn't seem like the level of writing I would expect to receive such critical acclaim.
Overall I'm mainly just having a hard time understanding the praise for this book. I don't see a problem with others liking it, but this book seriously won Goodreads' best fiction award for 2022? I just don't see that at all.
by Full-Sympathy5201
36 Comments
Totally overrated and a slog to get through in my opinion.
Good decision on the DNF. I soldiered through and regretted it. Most of the characters were insufferable or unrealistic and the story was not compelling for me. I got heavy YA vibes as well. Nothing wrong with that, just unexpected for the amount of hype the book was getting.
I liked it.
I had my expectations really heightened for this and while there were parts I liked, the climactic thing that happens feels out of nowhere and everything that comes after feels like a depressing rush to an unsatisfying conclusion. I liked the prose. It was not my favorite thing ever.
I feel the same. This was a comment I left on another thread:
>Same, and I couldn’t understand the absolutely glowing effusive praise I was seeing all over the internet. I read it with a book club and we all agreed there were some really nice moments, but the writing overall just had a lot of baffling choices, and the characters didn’t feel like actual people. Someone mentioned that it almost seemed like the author hadn’t experienced grief despite it being a huge theme of the book, and another chimed in that they likely weren’t a parent either. The book started off strong and was pretty good through the middle, but by the final third I was completely checked out.
Also, I feel like in this day and age you can’t just [BIG SPOILER] >!throw in a workplace shooting!< to move the plot forward and not properly deal with the implications of that?? In my opinion, it was handled very poorly and also didn’t succeed at changing the character dynamics in any meaningful way. That last portion of the book felt like a mess.
One of my favorite reads of this year.
Yes, I really disliked it. The games they designed seemed super niche, but strange for a successful company. They are both toxic individuals, are terrible friends, and both had zero character growth. The author went into huge detail about games pretty much everyone knows the basic mechanics of, like Super Mario Bros, but used archaic words pretty much every other page without providing any further context for those words, which gave off a very pretentious attitude. Learning the ins and outs of game design would’ve been fascinating if perhaps a different author wrote this. Some reviews said the author really must be a gamer because she knows so much, but I didn’t get that vibe at all.
I really don’t understand the acclaim and so many people constantly qualifying their praise with, “I’m not a gamer, but I loved it!” I am a gamer and the book was awful. Also, you don’t have to be the thing you’re reading about to understand/appreciate/enjoy it. It’s almost like people really don’t want to be assumed to be a gamer, like it’s a bad thing, if they wound up liking this book.
Hugely overrated, IMO. There was no depth to the two main characters – both were awful at times and never showed any growth, and that’s without getting into the other terrible characters – and the descriptions of the games etc were just boring.
The Goodreads Fiction award is not exactly the Nobel Prize. It’s almost always won by some popular contemporary fiction. It’s the book with the combo of most accessibility and best marketing. I have long ceased using those awards as a benchmark for what to read. Even if they’re enjoyable, I never consider them my best read in that genre.
Certainly made me wonder how Amazon chooses its Best Book of the Year. Not even close for me. I mean I finished it!
So bad I couldn’t even finish it.
I liked the book. I thought it’s depictions of Sam and Sadie were very realistic. Those complaining about the lack of character growth I think aren’t appreciating the fact that most real people don’t undergo fundamental changes in personality. I thought Sams unhealthy ways of coping with his disability were extremely realistic and not flattering. Not everyone has a heart of gold, and the book was unflagging in its commitment in exploring the inner thoughts of the main characters, whether or not they were flattering. I will concede that Marx felt half sketched, he was unbelievably kind.
I really enjoyed the book since I could personally relate to many things from the story. However I understand your opinion, and I have read and hated some books that have gotten a lot of praise and I dont understand it. In the end I think we all look for different things in the books ee read.
I wish i DNFd but i thought it was going to get better and it didn’t.
I didn’t like it. I thought everyone involved was incredibly toxic to each other and should get as far away from each other as possible.
I read *The Storied Life or AJ Fikry* (also by Zevin) when I was a teenager and really enjoyed it. I was so excited to read Tomorrow x3 when it came out, especially after the insane hype it got. I couldn’t make it past the first 50 pages. The characters were boring as hell. They had zero chemistry and the plot moves soooo slow. There was just nothing for me to get interested in. I was super disappointed.
This book reminded me of an episode of Mythic Quest called A Dark Quiet Death. And it’s one of my favorite episodes of television.
I don’t think you’re supposed to like these characters. They’re not exactly likable. They’re full of their own ambition and insecurity. They’re constantly trying to make their way in the world and are incredibly flawed individuals. Their coping mechanisms are trash. And Sadie’s relationship with Dov is horrendous but not unusual. Actually, her relationship kind of reminded me of Marianne in Normal People.
I like books with flawed characters who aren’t going to show drastic personality changes. The book is just about them being humanly imperfect and frustrating. I find it interesting that you loved The Remains of the Day but call this one a slog. I didn’t dislike The Remains of the Day but I wouldn’t rank it in the top of my Ishiguro books.
But that’s just me. I don’t think this book is overhyped or overrated because at least it had a compelling story to me and I found how they interact with each other super interesting. We’ve all had friends from our childhood and seeing how their progression into adulthood works out is intriguing.
A book that I think is incredibly overhyped and not worth the stars it gets on Goodreads is Project Hail Mary. I don’t think this book needs to stick every landing, but I enjoyed how it approached characters who weren’t the generic characters you get in books.
It’s okay if it didn’t tickle your fancy. But I don’t think it wins the overrated tag. You’re not going to like every book out there.
I didn’t like it. I didn’t like any of the characters. I don’t get the hype. It’s just went on and on…..
I almost DNFd it but stuck with it. Marx has a chapter in the book that is beautifully written but overall, the rest of the book was just okay. There was an entire section that I ended up skipping (the Pioneer game) because it was so clunky.
There’s a harsh reality to Mazer and Sadie’s characterization. People don’t really change. We experience things, we grow, but we are prisoners to our childhood hangups and insecurities. It’s not a book about video games, it doesn’t rely on formula and it doesn’t aim to please. Its a stark and honest book about people, trauma and the limits of empathy. It’ll be one of the more significant books of the 2020s and fully deserves it. I think people that say that the two leads are unrealistic or don’t develop or whatever have been fed bullshit about character arcs and plot structure for too long.
I really enjoyed that book! I wonder if it’s a generational thing? I’m GenX – same as the author – so it felt nostalgic and familiar to me, which was part of the appeal. But I can see how it might feel outdated to a younger person who is more up-to-date with today’s gaming culture.
Late to the party but I got about 80 pages in and decided I didn’t give a shit about either of the characters. Probably won’t pick it back up.
I found it incredibly compulsive and I see why it was so popular but I felt very let down by it’s handling of all the characters in the second half. I’ve never had so much hope for a book in the first half to begin to feel like the author is just messing with me to be smart or interesting.
I think the hype around it and the marketing of it around sam and sadie’s platonic friendship really didn’t help. They were hardly even friends for half of it and it made Sam’s feelings for Sadie feel like a huge letdown when I was promised something new. It frustratingly had so much potential and I did like her writing style, just hated the plot
I felt like the poly formula in the book was: think of every conceivable social issue, throw the same three characters into those issues, but don’t actually explore the emotional impact of said issue.
I’ve rented it from the library three times and never got past the first 40 or so pages.
I made this comment about it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/13lwku1/what_do_you_do_if_the_book_youre_reading_has_a/jktgdz6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=1&utm_term=1&context=3
My main gripe is that when it comes to the characters and setting, there’s an awful lot of telling without much showing.
When young Sadie randomly tells Sam that her family skips meals a lot since her sister got sick, I actually thought this was a parody of NPC dialogue in games – which is often rammed with unnatural scene-setting details – and gave it the benefit of the doubt. But it continues.
The whole Anna Lee suicide sequence is a particularly egregious example, where a dying woman manages a whole conversation about the stage actor’s union while lying with a broken neck losing ‘copious amounts of blood.’ Immediately after this, Sam’s mum rushes to find him in the bodega, where we’re treated to this mad NPC interaction:
‘“You’re the mother,” the shopkeeper said. “What a world. What a thing for a boy to see.”
“He didn’t leave, did he?”
“No, but he was quite distraught, so I gave him quarters to play the machine in the back of my store. Children love games, though the machine doesn’t make as much money for me as it once did.”’
It’s when you notice the same thing happening in prose that you realise we’re meant to take this kind of dialogue seriously – because it’s all the author knows how to do:
‘Sam sat on the bed next to her, and she offered him the joint, which he refused. […] The only drugs he’d ever taken were whatever painkillers he’d been given in hospital, and he hadn’t liked the way they had clouded his ability to think. […] Because of this experience, Sam often suffered through pain that probably should have and could have been somewhat ameliorated.’
These traits should be well established by this point in the book. All we should need after ‘refused’ is a pause, or an ‘as expected’ – but instead we get about a page of boring and unnecessary character exposition.
I really wanted to like this novel for its original setting but the writing just killed it for me.
For a second I thought you were referring to the soliloquy from Macbeth and I was like wtf are you talking about?!
I did not think it was terrible, but I also did not think it was great. I thought it was an interesting exploration of friendship, and I particularly found the exploration of video games intriguing because I know very little about video games and I’ve never been a gamer. But no way is it groundbreaking the way some people have raved about it
I hated this book, I only got about 1/3 of the way through it – and DNFs are pretty rare for me too. I thought the writing style was awful. Telling not showing like others have discussed. And related to that – very strange dialogue. It felt unnatural, not how people actually speak to each other. I especially noticed it when Sam and Sadie were kids – I’m just reading it thinking, this sounds nothing at all like a conversation between 11 year olds. But the problem continued when they were adults too.
I also found the narration in general to be too clunky – it was simultaneously too detailed (e.g., to say someone shut the fridge, you don’t have to say they grabbed the door handle with their right hand, moved the door to the left, saw the light go off, and heard it close), while also doing very little to provide any depth to the characters.
Also hated every random social issue being crammed into the plot. And there would be these sections lecturing about them that did not flow with the prose at all or have any real connection to the plot.
I’m late to this thread, but I had a ton of issues with this book, too. One thing I haven’t seen a lot of comments on is how tragic it is. It feels like every single awful thing that can happen does happen, including mass shooting hate crimes, tragically dead mothers, and that weird inclusion of abortion for like no reason. To be clear, I’m a “leftist” and by the end I found this novel to be super mainstream liberal and pandering. It felt like the author was hitting every single hot-topic note, and not very well! It could have been a good book without all the tragedy and sadness. All the horrible stuff didn’t need to happen for this to be a great exploration of friendship IMO.
It was awful. People who say it was the best book they have ever read, have quite obviously not read anything worthwhile in their lives.
I was really excited to read this book. Half way through, it started slogging but I decided to continue. Towards the end all I could think about was how much I wanted to write a bad review or bash it on reddit.
The storyline could have worked if the characters weren’t so flat. Probably the worst aspect for me was the sprinkling of a specific kind of liberal agenda where it really didn’t need to be. (This coming from someone who is rather liberal). I felt like she wrote the book and then had a chat with her editor about how to stuff the storyline as much as possible with every single issue and non-issue American’s face today. It was so tedious towards the end that I actually skimmed through and skipped most of the chapter when Sam builds the stupid world meant for Sadie. Cringe.
It’s a ok book for a 13 -14 year old. That said I’ve read much better books when I was 10 so maybe I take that back. I just don’t get the ‘critical acclaim’. The only thing I’ll really remember about this book a year from now is the pretty book cover and how much I hated it.
It was awful. People who say it was the best book they have ever read, have quite obviously not read anything worthwhile in their lives.
I was really excited to read this book. Half way through, it started slogging but I decided to continue. Towards the end all I could think about was how much I wanted to write a bad review or bash it on reddit.
The storyline could have worked if the characters weren’t so flat. Probably the worst aspect for me was the sprinkling of a specific kind of liberal agenda where it really didn’t need to be. (This coming from someone who is rather liberal). I felt like she wrote the book and then had a chat with her editor about how to stuff the storyline as much as possible with every single issue and non-issue American’s face today. It was so tedious towards the end that I actually skimmed through and skipped most of the chapter when Sam builds the stupid world meant for Sadie. Cringe.
It’s a ok book for a 13 -14 year old. That said I’ve read much better books when I was 10 so maybe I take that back. I just don’t get the ‘critical acclaim’. The only thing I’ll really remember about this book a year from now is the pretty book cover and how much I hated it.
It’s a terrible book full of BS. I had to stop when the MIT professor is like “i don’t care use any langage they are all the same, btw suck my dick”. No ffs, they are not at all the same, and it was cringe asf.
Or the dialogue between the two of them when they are 11y old. I understand they are some kind of geniuses, but who the fuck speaks like that at 11y old, even if you are bright ?
Also the pseudo philosophical BS was too much for me.
I about halfway through and thinking of putting it down. It is so dull. Does anything ever happen?
The idea would have been good but the characters are two dimensional; there’s no depth in them. The story is also quite boring and so so soapy!
Wow I’m glad I’m not the only one!!! I was intrigued at first, then during the middle they lost me, then after the great event I was intrigued but also disappointed that it went that way. But such is life, I guess. I think this book wants to be a Netflix movie so bad.
I know I’m late, but I had to run to the internet to validate my hate for this book. It’s awful. You’re so correct. It raises so many social issues but doesn’t adequately address them? Lots of representation which is awesome (and I also think this snagged many people’s attention and love) but something about it comes off so pretentious. The time jumps were a bit annoying, especially in the beginning and the miscommunication and relationships reminded me of Normal People which I also hated 😂🤭